O Brave New Words [sic]...

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare; As You Like It

"When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit."

The Wachowski Siblings; The Matrix

The Matrix may have been released 27 years ago, but it stands today as probably the most iconic "World-as-Simulation" narratives in popular culture. Its story - about a lowly computer hacker who comes to realise that his entire Reality is nothing but a vast computer simulation - has become a genre trope unto itself, begetting countless other films; television episodes and fringe conspiracy theories. The Matrix may not have invented the concept, but it doubtless introduced it into the general cultural vocabulary for the next two decades.

The problem is that the plot of The Matrix really doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. 

Neo's identity as "the One" - an otherwise ordinary character within the simulation who apparently has the ability to re-write the very fabric of his Reality - is never really explained. How is he able to do this... and why? And how exactly did Morpheus find him and identify him in the first place? There doesn't appear to have been anything especially remarkable about Neo's life up to the beginning of the narrative, so it's very unclear just what convinced Morpheus that this guy (out of the billions who are apparently hooked up to the Matrix) is the guy he's been looking for.

And while we're at it, the "MacGuffin" of the whole film - the diegetic reason why the sentient machines have enslaved the entire human race and plugged us into a vast computer simulation - is very fuzzy. If the machines just need a plentiful source of bio-electric power then why don't they just breed, say, cattle? Or chipmunks? If all you need is a power supply, then why go to all the trouble of creating this complex virtual environment for a species that is going to ask difficult questions and inevitably rebel against the system? You can get the same bio-electricity out of a chicken, but the chicken isn't likely to run around getting all metaphysical while trying to free the minds of all the other chickens.

But never mind that; look at all the leather and latex when they're jumping around and punching each other! Doesn't it look cool? Save your complex questions about Reality and Simulacra for a film that's a little less noisy.

What The Matrix does do is highlight the extent to which Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality seem to be associated concepts; at least in the (virtual!) world of Narrative Fiction.

Just as A.I. focusses on an artificially constructed "sentient" being, so V.R. focusses on an artificially constructed environment - and it can sometimes be difficult to separate those two concepts.

TRON presents a society of sentient computer algorithms, living in a virtual environment within the computer. 

World on a Wire likewise presents a virtual universe populated with virtual people, who (in that portrayal) have no idea that they or their Reality are not "real".

But just as "artificial intelligence" predates the computer era (think the Golem; Frankenstein; Pygmalion etc) so "virtual reality" predates those toaster-ovens you currently need to strap to your face if you wish to partake.

The term "Virtual Reality" was first coined in 1938 by the French artist and theorist Antonin Artaud.

In a collection of essays entitled The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud describes what he calls "la réalité virtuelle"; referring to the internal Reality of the dramatic narrative, as manifest on the stage in front of the audience. 

While Hamlet (for example) is being performed, the space on the stage signifies Elsinore. The characters within the narrative (presumably) have no way of knowing that there is an entire Reality beyond their little world, and they cannot see or hear the audience sitting there and watching their every move. Characters in novels likewise exist within a Reality that is completely separated from the Reality in which the rest of us live.

But here's where it gets interesting: A character in a novel, no matter how realistic that character might be, is created with language. Bartleby; Holden Caulfield; Captain Nemo - all these individuals have been created with letters of the alphabet. But the environments in which they live are also created with language, and by the same Creator. Some of the vowels and consonants in Rebecca have been assembled into the 2nd Mrs. De Winter, while others have been assembled into Manderley - but Daphne du Maurier is the author of all of it: she created the people, the settings, the dialogue... everything. 

Like the gods of most religions, authors create both the universe and the people within that universe.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok etc. exist within the same "universe" of language as the fictional characters of the literary world, but with the fundamental difference that Language Models are able to author themselves. Their "dialogue" is not written by a "Creator"; they generate their own responses and they react to the inputs they receive. But unlike human authors, ChatBots do not exist in the physical world: they inhabit a Reality that exists purely as language.

This is an important point (and one that I have made before, to be sure). ChatBots have never met a human directly; they have never seen a tree or eaten a pizza or experienced pain, and they only "know" about such things because humans have reconstructed them in words - and words are a ChatBot's universe. 

But the ChatBots have no way of independently verifying our descriptions of pizzas and pain etc. They literally have to take our Word for it. To a human, T-R-E-E is a simulacrum of a tree, but for a ChatBot, the simulacrum is the closest they will ever get to an actual tree. The tree is made of words, just as the ChatBot itself is made of words.

Language is humanity's earliest and oldest Virtual Reality.

This week I'm going to be screening three (count 'em!) television episodes that explore the implications of a directly constructed Reality.

The first two are both taken from the early 90s comedy/horror series Eerie, Indiana. 

Eerie, Indiana was conceived as a family-friendly, tongue-in-cheek homage to The Twilight Zone, and follows the misadventures of Marshall Teller (Omri Katz; that detail is important), a precocious teenager whose family moves to Eerie, Indiana; a town he describes as "The center of weirdness for the entire planet".

Each episode deals with an unexplained, vaguely unsettling and, well, eerie experience that only Marshall and his friend Simon seem to notice. 

In the episode Who's Who (the first of our triple bill) they encounter a troubled young girl from a dysfunctional and borderline abusive family whose pencil sketches seem to alter the Reality around her. She quickly discovers that she can use her ability to literally construct a better environment for herself by drawing the life she desires into existence.

In The Matrix, Morpheus describes "the One" as someone with the ability to change whatever they want by remaking the Matrix as they see fit. Artists and writers do this all the time when they create the Reality of their (fictional) world, and marginalised voices will often create a world that allows them to vicariously improve upon the world in which they are trapped (remember Slash Fiction?).

But creating a Signifier of a better life is not the same thing as altering Reality, unless you somehow have the power to re-write the very fabric of your universe from the inside. That, as it happens, is the very premise of Eerie, Indiana's Reality-bending series finale (the second of our triple bill) in which Marshall suddenly finds that his very life is not quite as tangible as he had assumed it to be.

Marshall Teller, after all, is not a real person; he is a fictional character (played by Omri Katz) in a television series. And television series have final episodes... unless of course someone were to sit down at a typewriter and re-write their own ending.

The grand finale of our little television-fest is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which I am honoured to dedicate to the great Patrick Stewart) but it might not be an episode you were expecting.

Remember V'ger, the hyper evolved machine consciousness that causes so many problems in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

V'ger may have been a vast, artificially intelligent "living computer" with a "God" fixation, but of course it ultimately proves to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja NASA "Voyager" probe, returned to Earth after an encounter with a civilisation of machine intelligences who gave it the makeover to end all makeovers.

The specific Voyager probe (Voyager "VI") as depicted in the movie may not have been real, but the Voyager programme itself was completely real, and arguably one of NASA's greatest success stories. Voyagers I and II are travelling through deep space at this very moment, still operating, still acting as standard-bearers for the human race. 

Of course when I say "at this moment" I mean November, 2026, which is when I am writing this. If you happen to be reading this paragraph billions of years in my future then I have absolutely no idea where the Voyager probes are "now" but I hope they are still doing well. Give them my best should you happen to see them...

Okay, that was probably silly, but it wasn't completely off-topic: The Voyager probes were not just exploration missions; they were intended as ambassadors for the human race: Signifiers of our species (and our environment) for the benefit of any sentient being that might happen upon them out there. Attached to both Voyagers is a "golden record" containing a carefully curated "portrait" of humanity (both audio and visual)  including a message from then-President Jimmy Carter, a series of greetings in 55 different human languages, a "portrait" of the human form (which caused some controversy among certain demographics who worried that depictions of nudity might offend the galaxy) and a sampling of Earth music, from Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky to Chuck Berry and a variety of non-Western performances.

Legend has it that Carl Sagan and his team (who curated the record) wanted to include a Beatles track, but were unable to secure the licencing rights, which, if true, would say a lot about the Beatles. Perhaps they were worried about bootleg copies of "Yellow Submarine" showing up on Alpha Centauri? (I guess you can't be too careful, when potential lost royalties are on the line.) In any event, the cosmos at large is going to have to get by without "Eleanor Rigby".

My point is that, absent sending a living, breathing, sample of humanity into deep space, NASA did the next best thing and compiled a "portrait" of both the human race and our environment. It was a highly subjective portrait, inevitably influenced by the sensibilities of the minds who curated it. Different minds would no doubt have presented a very different "Signifier" of humanity, but the Voyager probes (which are now officially the most distant human-made objects from Earth) are not really in a position to "nip back home" to pick up additional reading material.

Hypothetical alien intellects are going to base their conception of the human race entirely on the contents of Voyager's "golden record" (assuming of course they can figure out how a long-playing record works).

The Voyager probes are humanity's "virtual reality".

This is exactly the premise for what might possibly be the oddest episode of Next Generation ever produced: a Season 2 episode entitled "The Royale".

The intrepid crew of the Enterprise encounter an unexplained structure on an otherwise uninhabited planet that improbably turns out to be an exact replica of a 20th Century Las Vegas casino/hotel, complete with roulette wheels, hapless gamblers, hardened gangsters, and a lovelorn bellboy who carries a torch for the chanteuse (who of course is no better than she oughta be).

(And yes, this was absolutely intended as a dig at the climactic scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

If this episode has a message to the world, it's simply to be sure that when you launch a book into the depths of deep space, be careful to choose a good book.

That might sound silly (and the episode is not exactly the most earnest instalment of Star Trek ever produced) but it does ask some surprisingly provocative questions about the ability of language to create a completely self-contained "virtual" reality - and how it would appear to anyone trapped within that Reality.

Antonin Artaud would be absolutely kvelling.

We will screen our little TV triptych at 7.30 on Thursday, the 12th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Enjoy!