Creating the Elsewhere: Virtual Reality in the Ancient Roman World

At first glance the ancient world may seem an odd place to study concepts of virtuality, but I believe that looking at the art and architecture of the ancient Romans through the modern lens of the virtual can provide surprising insights into how these spaces were viewed, experienced, and understood by their ancient users and may elucidate a further factor in the development of Roman painting beyond mere changes in aesthetic taste. Using a reexamined definition of the "virtual" that divorces it from a reliance on the digital and modern technology, I will investigate how ancient spaces were used to create environments that were intended to transport the viewer to another often distant or fantastic place, to a virtual "elsewhere.".;In explaining how these Roman spaces worked to effect such "transportation" through their architectural forms and decorative schemata, I have had recourse to two primary theoretical frameworks. The first is the burgeoning sub-field of cognitive linguistics known as Text-world Theory, which attempts to provide an understanding of how humans universally process discourse through the creation of mental "worlds" into which they project themselves, a projection which I believe forms the basis of virtual experience.;The second is the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in particular his discussion of framing in his first book on cinema, and his idea of the hors-champ or the out-of-field, that which is outside of any bounding frame. For Deleuze, as a set of elements becomes ever more bounded and closed the out-of-field can imbue a it with a certain metaphysical duration, with what he terms a fourth dimension of "time" and a fifth of "spirit." Thus a (nearly) closed set acquires a certain trans-spatial existence. My dissertation research suggests that the architecture and decorative programs of many Roman houses created just such not-quite-closed sets, and that as a result they appealed to the viewer's "spirit," engaging him in imagination of a "more radical elsewhere.".