I haven’t updated this website in 1.5 years and am working on it summer of 2025. please bear with me 🙏🏻
virtual
How do we think of perception, illusion, and imagination?
digital
How has a digital world affected our idea of humanity?
real (?)
How do we understand realities beyond the physical?
In grad school I studied how photography radically changed our society into a visual culture, challenging our media, social order, and even our understanding of humanity’s place in the world. I am currently applying that inquiry into the radical effects of new technologies on the digital age and web 3.0 . Where is our place in the world? How do we expand our sense of what is ‘real’? What is keeping us tied to an epistemological reliance on the physical world? What opportunities open up to us once we understand an expanded sense of ‘space’ ‘world’ and ‘community’? How can we more deeply understand these technologies, and their effect on us, and learn to responsibly use them?
I argue that in principle we can lead meaningful lives inside metaverse-style virtual worlds. These worlds needn’t be illusions, hallucinations, or fictions. Our time in them needn’t be escapism. People already lead complex and meaningful lives in virtual worlds such as Second Life, and VR will make this commonplace.
Grae Bowen 