가상현실에서 실재를 재현하기 -리차드 파워스의 『어둠을 헤치며』

Abstract

This article examines how the real is represented in Richard Powers' novel Plowing the Dark (2000). I focus on Richard Powers' discursive writing to employ such interdisciplinary fields as: informatics, cybernetics, linguistics, and art with the development of artificial intelligence. I also explain the self-reflexive and anti-representational aesthetic in the virtual reality where a significant paradigm shift takes place in the cognitive science. Plowing the Dark consists of two narrative stories which exist at exact opposites. One of them is a story about a kidnaped American teacher Taimur Martin, turned a Lebanese prisoner of war who spends five years imprisoned in a single room. The other narrative is a story about the “Cavern,” a high tech virtual reality simulator which is being built by a research team including the main character, Adie Klarpol in the Realization Laboratory of a conglomerate known as TeraSys. Plowing the Dark suggests the methods by which virtual reality challenges traditional ideas of reality and virtuality, as in Taylor’s remark: “The dream inspiring the virtual reality technology is to render the virtual real and the real virtual by erasing the interface separating mind and matter.” In this view, Powers describes how the real is representative in the computational universe in Plowing the Dark. Nevertheless, this novel raises a question whether reality can exemplify the several kinds of rooms such as a painting, a jungle, or a cathedral by employing poetic, linguistic and nonlinguistic metaphors, and computer languages. That is why the real is reproduced; thus, it is a hyperreal, a simulation.