Week 4 - Response to Content

The great escape

" Ted (after playing the game "eXistenZ"): I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/quotes/)

eXistenZ is a science fiction movie from 1999. It's about the famous gamedesigner Alegra who gets attacked while presenting her new reality game "eXistenZ". While running from her assassins with a a huge price on her head, she has to play the game she has invented along with a media student, Ted, to get everything back to normal.

The ultimate dilemma of the movie is about knowing the difference between reality and created reality. Playing the game causes disorientation, and the lines between truth and fiction are getting more and more blurry. Which reality is the real reality? How can you tell them apart? Can the alternate realities multiply?

Kevin Robin defines cyberspace as an ideological construction. He describes it as a tunnel vision, where cyberspace is a place helping us to create a reality which is more desirable than the one we currently live in, what we see is different from what is actually present. He predicts that in the future, people will want to escape into this "made up reality" for good, and forget about the real world and the context we live in. (K. Robins, 2000).

The plot of "eXistenZ" is therefore getting hugely relevant to our society. We tend to get more interested in the world of virtual reality than the real reality, and thereby loose touch with the problems that actually is present, still in the belief that technology is a socially shaped phenomenon and not the other way around.

"Allegra: So how does it feel?
Ted: What?
Allegra: Your real life. The one you came back for.
Ted: It feels completely unreal."
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/quotes)


Sources:
K. Robins, 2000, Cyberspace and the world we live in, The Cybercultured Reader, found via Google Books, viewed 20 August 2011.

Memorable Quotes for eXistenZ, 1999, IMDB, viewed 20 August 2011, located at <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/quotes>.