(From) A to B (and back)

Publisher's text about this issue:

Printed Project 13 Virtual Fictional brings together a range of artists practices that both reflect upon and utilize strategies drawing upon notions of meta -fiction, virtual space, hoaxes and misdirection. As Kevin Atherton has observed, ­ as a consequence of the emergence of virtual reality technology in the 1990s, the age-old relationship between truth and fiction was cast into a new light. Now, two decades later, when the hype has largely subsided surrounding VR, we can see that the true alternative world that was emerging twenty years ago, was not after all, the one to be found by each of us individually through the act of putting a helmet over our heads, but rather the one that would collectively contain us all. Perhaps the lasting contribution that virtual reality technology has made is as a poetic metaphor serving to underscore and sharpen our awareness of the virtuality of existence itself, rather than, as so much of the hype wanted us to believe; as an alternative to it.

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