What do Alice’s rabbit hole, the red pill and a VR headset have in common? They all invite us to leave one reality behind and step into another.
From Alice in Wonderland to Snow Crash, The Matrix and eXistenZ to today’s social virtual worlds, Christopher Werth traces how popular culture has imagined virtual realities long before and while we began building and inhabiting them ourselves.
But this is not simply a history of escapism. Across literature, film, games and virtual worlds, these imagined spaces have become places where we experiment with identity, power, desire and community and question what we consider real in the first place.
Take a trip down the rabbit hole and discover how decades of pop culture have shaped the virtual worlds we inhabit today and the ones we might build tomorrow.