Before code,beyond screen: Media archeology and convergence friction in early VR art (1993–1995)

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has often been narrated as if it emerged ex nihilo, whether through Lanier’s early proclamations of a new epoch, Rheingold’s celebration of Sensorama, or, particularly in Japan, the rhetoric of a “first year of VR” that accompanied the release of the Oculus Rift. Yet from a cultural and artistic perspective, VR was not born “out of nothing” but is situated within historical genealogies of media such as panoramas, theater, cinema, and interactive art. This essay proposes the concept of convergence friction to describe VR’s distinctiveness: when heterogeneous media traditions intersect in VR, their tensions persist rather than resolve into unified forms. Unlike cinema and television, which quickly absorbed such frictions into stable narrative and broadcast languages, VR sustains them as productive resources. Through close readings of three seminal early works, Jeffrey Shaw’s EVE (1993), Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder (1993), and Char Davies’s Osmose (1995), this essay traces how embodiment, collectivity, and bodily rhythm became principles of immersion while colliding with earlier media legacies. Contemporary VR artworks such as Notes on Blindness (2016), Carne y Arena (2017), Chalkroom (2018), and AI History 1890–2090 (2023) extend these frictions in new directions, demonstrating that VR is continually redefined at the threshold between past and future media. By theorizing VR as a site of convergence friction, this essay argues that its incompleteness, its refusal to settle into a stable language, is not a deficiency but the very condition of its artistic and cultural significance. VR is not ex nihilo but perpetually reborn, sustained by unresolved genealogies and anticipatory futures.