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Putting a pause on the plethora of science and medical articles that dominate other sections of this book, the authors here consider the impact on larger parts of society (not just hockey goalie is training, but sports in general, like cricket), Internet linguists like David Crystal and women being shut out of VR development by a sexist gaming industry. None of them get #metoo political yet barely argue compellingly.

Having studied this play way back when, what strikes me about the Preface and Introduction was that this classic was perhaps written in response to that Boalian joker of Ancient Athens, Aristophanes, whose Thesmophoriazousae may have led to Euripides’ self-imposed exile and his writing of Bacchae. Lots of modern-day socio-political issues to unravel in this new edition, and a chance to act them out!

The seventieth birthday celebration, among many other milestones Boal faced midway through March 2001, brings about quite a few complex emotions. Foremost is the envy he perhaps jokingly directs at older colleagues who still live vibrant, youth-filled lives. Boal has much to feel proud about as his centre runs and conducts research on the arts, but like the aged actor playing a doddering Lear, his speech is for show.

A brave new Silicon Valley world is well established with VPL both at its centre yet remaining on the margins of culture. With such an omnipresent sphere of influence it surprising to find just a few lukewarm comments on 350° video; more space to dedicate to Japan’s VR scene, Jim Henson, Terry Gilliam, Al Gore and William Gibson, not to forget his generational connections to artists Antonin Artaud and Susanne Langer.

Not what I expected to find in a chapter on drama in prison - many others trodding upon the redemptive Christianesque “those poor souls, lookat ‘em performing HMS Pinafore, lovely.” Instead Boal points to the grittier realities of what brought the inmates into prison (including himself in Brazil’s dark days) and what artists and citizens need to know about their eventual return to society by staging a Forum.

Entrenched as the last three authors are in a medical world where differing types of digital reality will help save lives (by simulating life-or-death decisions without having to practice on live bodies), each chapter gives pertinent examples of how emerging media evolved. This Reader may just be applicable for the VR-initiated but the chapters are windows into one of few fields that can afford such gadgets.

The eyes have it, for the time being, but Lanier’s interest in the virtual extends to many other sensory and bodily inputs: his hair gets an extended footnote, for instance. So much of the reality his young start-up VPL wanted to include puts an emphasis on feeling like a viewer belongs in the artificial realm, without solely “seeing and believing.” His About chapters are starting to mention more non-VPL key players.

“The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’” (King Lear IV.i). Just a bit of elbow grease fixes up the Rover for Watney’s departure. The real drama in this short section comes from the multiple homefronts as each astronaut connects with a loved one on Earth revealing the true cost of the NASA (and now CNSA) mission. Mark complains about leftover disco while the crew may cannibalize itself.

A shorter but just as devastating discourse on how a globalized economy crushes the spirit of the artist, leading Boal to the symbolic suicide - and yet his warning from Guanajuato, Mexico, shows how even as a literal corpse the manic market will find some way to make money. Boal faces the indifferent times with a sense of purpose, however, knowing that for all the moribund monetization that culture lives within art.

Gong’s chapter is perhaps the closest to my own field of research and yet throws in so many conjunctions in the opening paragraph it was hard to tell what she had to say about the educational and interpersonal aspects of VR: “However, learning English... Moreover, students would only learn... Consequently, this is a waste of the students’ time...” (p. 36). As chapters shift into healthcare, more rigour is introduced.

Boal applies some narrative kung-fu to his theory, telling stories about Thespis and Solon, a street-wise Aristotle, an evolutionary tale of tree-dwelling apes and a feisty Lady at a New York Theatre of the Oppressed workshop. Each account brings to life the point that an artistic approach to a forum is perhaps the best countermeasure to the threat of imperial-like globalization that Hollywood has successfully shown.

Just at a point in his autobiography where I start to doubt how insightful and clever his conversational accounts might be: his out-maneuvering of coders, movie producers and girlfriends, Jaron drops a surprising self-diagnosis of face-blindness (unless he just happened to be watching the same Arrested Development episodes on Netflix as I was). His quest to bring the full body into the virtual just got real!

Still firmly planted in science-technologyland, authors give brief accounts of how VR tools have improved students’ ability to visualize molecules, DNA structures or design flaws of buildings (without having to deal with real-life repercussions of collapse). Jung considers both learners and teachers’ role, Zhou misses out on gaming first person shooter connection, while Dai engineers a move into the fourth dimension.

The short-essay format makes this collection more like the Reader’s Digest of emerging technology, rather like extended abstract for funding applications. Students’ interest seems to be solely on the scientific angle: how virtual simulations mostly help students visualize chemical compounds or not-yet dissected animals. Garayt-Wright also includes a glimpse of an OASIS-like future classroom without PowerPoint slides!

I jumped the gun with my last progress update knowing that there were endnotes for the chapter and yet posting before I read them. The Prometheus Project continues to describe how neurons are firing in multiple parts of the brain of the spectator perceiving reality. There is perhaps some irony in naming the project thus, knowing that aesthetic acting can only go so far (uphill?) before needed to be repeated.

Alonso’s chapter gets the book back on track for the final section, giving examples of how the concept of cybereducation is used and abused in educational and medical settings (also touching on his local Catalonia while also remain globally astute). Yet let other chapters dilute with health practices in what appears to be purely educational discourse (or as others would see it, medical knowledge muddied by academia).

A more mature Boal recounts the multiple ways his forty-year experiment called Theatre of the Oppressed has branched and blossomed into its own theory, the present Aesthetics, while staying connected to the Brazilian culture from which it arose (no mention of Freire yet, not that there needs to be). He distrusts of the Word yet praises the metaphoric is a curious tension set up in his theoretical foundation.

Wang writes of China’s adoption of technology going back to Confucius and cuts wide swaths of history; Barlex describes all of England, yet fixes on no particular place (so all innovation happens in London then?) making both chapters seem inconsequential. These authors seem to paint themselves into scholarly corners. No wonder President Xi might become the new Mao and England is on the verge of brexiting from Europe.

Taking a few chapters’ pause from his freewheeling life on the road, Lanier takes several stabs at defining VR, hitting upon some sparkling and unsavoury insights about the not-yet-there medium. Once giving his readers a taste of what it is all about, he switches back to his hippie-happening life moving from the East Coast elitism to the wild West. Finding his first audience reveals how long he has been about it all.

Leavy's 2018 chapter from her self-edited Handbook of Arts-Based Research retroactively expands into book format - meaning she wrote the book and then condensed it into a later chapter - it seems to be affected by the same issue I have with Barone & Eisner's chapter (1997) expanded into a book (2012), both of which are cited frequently by Leavy: there is not enough "reality" to back up artistic "virtuality."

Delving deeper into Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, which has now taken root in the Word, Sound and Image of his playful practice and branched out in many fascinating ways, I am impressed to find all of it take shape as a tree. Not sure if or where Boal cites Jung’s study on alchemy but both certainly are aiming at the same psychological process of transformation. Like Bogart, Boal could do better at citing sources.

Each chapter was written in the years leading up to 2014, when democracy, gender identity and ecology were slowly being eroded, unlike the full-swing patriarchal, xenophobic planet-destroying pipeline-building mode most First World governments have devolved into over the intervening three or four years. Each chapter still puts its hope in educational tech, but only Elshof points out how it only makes the rich richer.

Theatre is a social system; an important point Bogart keeps circling back to, even in the privacy of her Virginia Woolf-like room where she started writing A Director Prepares and rehearsing Ellen Lauren’s one-woman show. The connections and collaborations she forged with artists, thinkers and fully-alive humans (even those who have died but live on with their words) makes her policies of theatre sustaining.

Writing his autobiography in order to elaborate deeper into how VR will eventually dawn into a new everything, it seems his humble origins relate back to his parents escaped from the Old World and it brutal genocidal policy towards certain people. Where the young Lanier ended up is the borderlands between Texas, Mexico and New Mexico; enduring family tragedies in a place that will probably become buried under a wall.

Gibson’s bemusement over older and soon-to-be-antiquated technology such as celluloid film and copper-wire phones is matched by his perplexed premonitions for newer digital media and Internet-ready formats. Not relying on everyone listening to have devoured his fiction (though perhaps knowing each stay at a swanky hotel has been because someone read his novels) is a safe strategy backing up his on-the-nose intuition.

The all-too-brief Pathfinder communication link to Earth led to some impressive nerdy wisecracks, but made Watney seem less of space pioneer - I kinda think that the drill short circuit was intentional so that he could take control of the narrative and wonder over the resilience of his Martian potatoes. Having seen the movie alleviates some tension, even the Elrond scene, but requires close, patient reading.

It is exciting to see a well-articulated method that happens to be exactly what I had intended to write in my dissertation, even has the Arts-Based virtual reality angle to boot! Leavy first describes how this evolving genre of research emerged from ethnography, yet I want this method to do more: swerve towards science fiction rather than reiterate earnest inquiries into holocaust survivors or gender-identity issues.

A couple of echoes back to the alchemy of theatre are mentioned in these chapters, but I still get the sense that Bogart is writing from the perspective of someone transformed rather than transforming. Her chapter on arrest has more to do with pausing to reflect on the spaciousness and empathetic process of her work in theatre, maybe she has reached a point of no return from her naval upbringing and bout with cancer?

The articles and essays are shorter and of a more disparate quality, as if Gibson had a thought pop into his head, wrote something related to it and sent to eager publications ready to print these pages ripped from a personal diary. Still appearing to be a prophet of technology, the Internet and all things science fiction, his optimism in his perception carried through to his readers who distrust the titular flavour.

Tapping into the negative aspects of theatre-making, Bogart becomes a bit like Yoda, with pain and failure being sources of strength; but rather than dwelling on the dark side of the Off Off Broadway scene, she builds her career somewhat indifferently placing herself between opposing forces. It is not so obvious here what works best, and yet the one method that seems to have helped is her ready-for-anything attitude.