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Ideas about time, space and numbers are thrown at the audience with such candid ease that belies her dense oral text: at times it seems like counting to ten and back is the most complex cognitive task any culture attempted, while on the other hand, the earliest dreams of a child contains the seeds of the future. No wonder that her mentor Jung is both an infection and spiritual awakening for these lucky lecture goers.

It is like the expanded universe of an old familiar story, some would argue the oldest story there is, but Adam and the occasionally mentioned Eve reads like a philosophical puzzle (if human beings exist, who was the first and why?) and given several hundred different interpretations by church scholars and alchemists. At least the latter seem to have their eye on the Second Adam’s return to purity others won’t allow.

Finding some sort of answers to why the universe is what it is, using some of the most out-there but precise measuring tools the early 21st century had available, Smolin makes a couple predictions about how a third, final road to quantum gravity will go. His postscripts go from the lighthearted “whoops” to the seething fury of a miscalculated formula. I suspect his 2031 postscript will be “shut up, string theorists!”

Intrigued as I am with the holographic principle, one of the many ideas that quantum theorists were projecting about the time Smolin wrote on present frontiers, it is not the Star Trek-like mirror dimension I had hoped it might be. Instead it almost seems like an extreme callback to Platonic Forms! While work on these roads must and will continue, I hope his neoNewton will prove black holes create universes.

An ever-widening circle of metaphors conjured to centre on the hot singularity, unknowable mystery of black holes, many of the theories instead look into the space between matter and particles, getting closer and closer to the strings, loops and knots that happen when the background lattice is removed. Reality may not be as mind-bending as Ant-Man’s recent subatomic trip and a solution may pop up in the 21st century.

This Perimeter Institute has some bright, artful minds: Neil Turok and now Lee Smolin - perhaps this place will become a site of inquiry for my research (at least through a lot of googling). Nevertheless, seeing how people, cultures and the universe are processes which need to unfold as stories bodes well for me, even the next two chapters investigating black holes without clear a narrative but digital possibilities.

A strong sense of an unfinished story in Suzuki’s brief praise of Bogart, almost as if he is holding back some crushing criticism he is famous for. Much more seems to be alluded to here when compared to lengthier commentary from erudite New York authors, who each in so many words say the same thing: “she got more style than American audiences deserve. Anderson poses the problem in terms of meat, i.e., 1990s’ wetware.

Addressing the elephant in the chatroom, perhaps reaching for the low-hanging forbidden fruit, Rudin explores how we make something, usually anything according to rule 34, pornographic virtual reality. Actually a more inclusive, less sadistic form of intimacy. The next chapters sum up the potential to bring the sphere into the actual world, not so much holodeck as magic augmented leaps into Artaud’s alchemical stage.

Very knowledgeable about the histories of quantum theory and their singular solution being just one of the three proposed roads, Smolin delights in his description of hard-to-grasp probabilities as they relate to cats. Unlike others writing on theoretical physics, he does not want to trap any of his feline exemplars in a box, but gives them the agency to choose, much like the observer who can interpret one’s reality.

Both playwrights, Machado and Mee, have brief, affectionate essays about Anne, kinda like a compilation of programme notes they have written on their collaborations over the years. Lauren’s Seven Points, however, feels more like a compulsion: an actor trying to sum up the nerve to map out the impact Anne and her Viewpoints had on Ellen’s career, the highs and lows. Ultimately Ellen discovers she was fighting herself.

Just when I thought I read it all, I find another book by Anne Bogart and her TOGA/SITI colleagues that gives a deeper insight into the amazing Viewpoints they have established. Even as these early essays by Anne and Tina get repeated more thoroughly in their Viewpoints Book, the short form of these flashes of inspiration illuminate the world each artist lived in while crafting this new director's technique.

The meet-cute across the uncanny valley, where brave twenty-somethings get their game on and connect in VR, adopting whatever cartoon-like avatar they find in the Rec Room. Rubin seems surprised that it all works the way it does but perhaps the quick-to-wed couple Priscilla and Mark had authentic feels without getting too much into the haptics. Fortunately, Rubin goes there in chapter 8 to find how the mind moves us.

Rorty’s defense of professional philosophers in the midst of an indifferent American society is self-effacing yet serves a purpose of inviting others into the long conversation between Plato, number of his readers and the whole academic system that Rorty was a part of along with his Drs. Dimble and Waffle. A view from outside the field and beyond the grave has fellow academic Bromwich eulogize the all-American Rorty.

Doing VR is well covered, as long as it remains a solitary experience. Including others in the same bubble-like simulation is the chimerical goal rarely achieved by even the longest running programs or having the most money thrown at a piece of technology. Of course, leave it to the creeps and trolls to perfect sexual harassment before more safe social spaces are established. And King Creepy already claimed “Spaces”.

The book concludes with the suggestion that hermeneutics could be a revolutionary way to move philosophy forward into the twentieth century beyond the Nature-Mirror Descartes and followers set up. It certainly has had its impact on educational research even though I still have a fuzzy idea of what it all means. At least now I can, like Romans who “smil’d at one another, and shook their heads” kind of get it.

Starting off as mysterious and unsettled, the story could be the post-apocalyptic sequel to Never Let Me Go but by the second chapter the mist lifts a little to find Axl and Beatrice in Arthurian England, setting out on a simple quest that will become an allegorical journey through the latter years. The Boatman and the Saxon village are two lessons they have to recall before God forgets them and their epoch.

Rubin gets around up and down the Pacific Coast, visiting early adaptors and futures envisioners while on a personal mission to recreate intimacy in a virtual space. Fully aware of the somewhat smutty connotations (and plenty more to delve into with later chapters), he starts with ways to have virtual hands and then full-body motion inside the still-too-expensive lightfields. Each innovation moves us in virtual time.

The full house of kings and queens makes pairing of psychological opposites intuited by alchemists and clearly divined into conscious and unconscious functions of the mind. With plenty of ancient and biblical texts to support Jung’s views, along with an expanded investigation of one of them in von Franz’ Aurora Consurgens, the conjunction of the male and female produces an androgynous unity much like wisdom.

The closer that I get to finishing my dissertation (ha!) the more I realize that many of the thoughts about VR, presence and self-consciousness are already out there being shared by others in print form, therefore making mine a story worth telling—when I eventually get to the final edit. Rubin was in the exact same situation, rushing to publish his before YouTubers snarkily tell how Spielberg has jumped the VR shark.

As pivotal as Anne-Marie was to the great Prison-Tempest caper, from encouraging the players to dance, sing and compose a musical about Caliban’s post-island life to the union of art and commerce represented by her new relationship with Prince Freddie, it is another Miranda who swaps roles with 8Handz’ Ariel. He gets a sea voyage with Felix and Estelle while the ghosting Phillips daughter is to the elements set free.

The team reports continue and strike a balance between hard-edged reality and romantic escapism: Evil Bro Antonio has murder, rape and injustice that seem to mirror the world as it is, even Miranda’s athletic rebuke is full of violence. On the other hand Gonzalo and Hag-seed are more aspirational and optimistic, a well-run kingdom and rehabilitation for dark deeds such as the prisoners Atwood conjures up would think.

The prospective image of the images method of playbuilding is very reminiscent of the Viewpoints training workshop I had the pleasure of attending a couple months ago: still the emphasis is on performing in the Forum/Arena, but using techniques to be aware of what we see and how we are seen. The examples Boal shares of Alzira and Berta are true to life cautionary tales of not enough desire and an overabundance of it.

After all the machinations of Felix Phillips’ revenge plan: the assumed identity, the drugs and kidnaping, he simply gives up his prey with the understanding that he is back where he wants to be and the politicians are under his digital-evidence wielding thumb drive. Still his revenge has the bitter taste of potato chip and cigarettes. Team Ariel, however, gained 8Handz his freedom and a new climate-changing purpose.

Hermeneuticss are a tricky enough concept to grasp (even spelling the word without the help of autocorrect takes a couple tries) yet they appear to be method for unmirroring philosophy from a human-only representation of nature. If they are an opposite of epistemology (perhaps a more interpretive way of knowing), does our Whiggishness make them good or bad or simply beyond any purpose for classifying them as reality?

Kind of wish this clever play had a little more of the mysterious nature of time, less of the parents’ marriage disintegrating while their kinky-disinterested genius daughter recounts her disastrous sexual relations. Perhaps it is all some metaphor for the cycles of pain and resentment that is coded, like the musical score, to reveal some mathematical hidden truth about how these unhappy folks don’t make use of time.

It would be a sorry turn of events if all the interactive theatre was just a fever dream of Felix as he lays dying of hypothermia in his tin bath, or monoxide poisoning in his Peugeot, but the way his enemies fall into their roles once separated and drugged in various places and mental states is almost too perfect. The corrupt minds will be found out thanks to 8Handz and his video recording. Freddie’s chess is mated.

The on-boarding of the Goblins is surprisingly vast, as if the whole prison-isle is at Felix Duke’s command. Do the guards know what is about to go down? How far is Estelle willing to go to push her lady luck? The ones magically not in the know are the tipsy politicos, visiting Fletcher on another routine campaign-stop. And like many vying to enter Canadian politics, they really had it (the prologued tempest) coming.

Midway towards the rainbow’s end, the forever out-of-reach point of accepting our desire, Boal’s method of theatre-making expands into the medical field, where oppression comes from within as much as from the outside. The patients and players he encounters help to give shape to the intangible qualities of his craft, while he applies their stories to his theories arcing between Ancient Greeks and a person next to him.

One final hurdle to clear before Rorty launches into his unmirrored philosophy and this chapter has to do with language. More specifically how any thinker can make a claim, in any language, to describe how things really are, even the intangible concepts. Just because Aristotle and Archimedes didn’t have access to telescopes or particle accelerators, their claims are just as valid as our pre-Galactic hypnotized views.