The virtualities of art (or how art is, above all, virtual)

Abstract

Virtual derives from the Latin virtus: power, faculty, force, virtue. Today it is a term used to refer to that which reproduces the experience of reality in the digital medium. In the art space, for its part, those works that are the result of human-machine multimedia interaction developed using virtual reality technology are called Virtual Art. But Virtual is the main name of Being in the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It has no relation to the illusory or false, so there would be a collective deformation of the concept, a comprehensive misunderstanding inherited from the technological, business and marketing world. This paper aims to take up the virtual Deleuzian to transfer it from the philosophical field to the art space and demonstrate their relationship. A qualitative methodology based on comparative literature has been used that has started from exegesis as a method to face the definition of the virtual until reaching eisegesis in the corpus concerning the virtualities of art. It is concluded that the potentiality of the artwork resides in its ability to generate virtualities. The virtual is the place of the enigma, the power of illusion, the true strategy of art. The artwork is the problem, art is the problematic set. The virtual is the foundation of art. Art is fundamentally virtual.