Virtual Reality is not as simple as we think. As a concept and a metaphor, Eliott Edge sees VR as a robust, powerful, and enduring way to think about everything from matter, to civilization, to the very faculty of thought.
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 a 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.
"Terence McKenna would have loved Eliott Edge and his plan for escape." - Douglas Rushkoff
"Wow! This is fantastic. I expected some essays about the promise of virtual reality (the headsets) and instead got a real, real, real reality. Edge actually took the effort to cite how everything is virtual reality! Religion (nice!), language (thank you!), and then our own conception of ourselves.
"Eliott argues that we all live in virtual worlds, starting with language, written material and religion, and that virtual reality is core to our humanity. Our institutions are ultimately projections that create virtual worlds, whose power exists because we believe in and participate in their propagation. This collection of essays is a short and fascinating introspection into closely held concepts of virtual reality and our own identity as a species." - Amber Case
"Eliott Edge is a vital voice offering a fresh perspective on how we conceptualize our history as well as our future; concepts applicable to the full breadth of human experience from the individual to society to humankind as a whole." - Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D
"The idea that our most cherished beliefs and deeply held 'truths' are simply symbolic 'virtual realities' is nothing less than an ontological awakening - a realization that we experience reality through a tightly woven matrix of perception and belief. This book shows how deep the rabbit hole goes." - Jason Silva
Complete with a new Introduction, this collection features essays written by Edge for The Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
These essays were the #1 and #2 most read essays in 2016 for the IEET, and the #2 essay in 2015. All three works are on Virtual Reality.
About the Author: Eliott Edge is an international lecturer, multi- disciplinary artist, and writer based in New York City. He has had an unusual career beginning in the counter cultural chambers of Reality Sandwich, Disinformation, and The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. He is now on the Advisory Board of the existential risk tank The Lifeboat Foundation, a member of the psychoanalytic group Das Unbehagen, and the founder of Educating Earth. Edge has presented material through the Museum of Computer Arts, The C.G. Jung Center, Anthology Film Archives, and most recently he presented a paper at the University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communications Department on Sigmund Freud and Hannibal Lecter.
He is also featured in the anthologies The Quest for Gnosis: Spirituality Without Dogma and The Fenris Wolf 9.
When he is not thinking about media, science, society, and technology, he is thinking about poetry, liminality, witchcraft, the paranormal, and jokes.
Edge frequently publishes and curates content under the online handle OddEdges-find him.
