It is difficult to speak of the idea of "space" within the virtual without also considering the idea of the "role" in which we ask our audiences to be; in other words, what do we ask of our audiences when they enter a virtual space? What do we hope people will experience within it? And how do we as artists design spaces which exist as expressions of our own imaginations while still allowing for the shared hallucination with those who enter it?

We have not yet developed a vocabulary for a real discussion of these non-linear spaces; hence, we have not developed a true exploration of what interactivity can be about. Most interactive virtual spaces are still bound by a sense of gravity, and of Cartesian planes. Cognition and imagination need not be bound by either of these, but our traditional forms of communication - speech and text - render them so. Can virtual spaces be viewed as a new form of language? They must if we are to explore truly new communicative directions.

Each of the two works presented - Atelier van Lieshout's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; and Maria Roussos' and Hisham's Bizri's Mitologies - are spaces for experience. The former exists in a physical space and the latter a virtual one. What I find interesting when I think of the two is what they each ask of their audiences. Physical-based work does not demand that I play any particular role other than myself, or that I become an actor or assume some rudimentary sense of character in the experience of it - I am essentially a tourist; but, the physical-based piece does not let me go until I completely walk through it, smell it, touch it, perhaps even taste it. On the other hand, pieces like Mitologies, while wonderfully complex in their layers and the meanings within them, suddenly makes me conscious that I am a "person on a journey, on a boat, being taken to a mosque", and I must be willing to suspend disbelief and assume that character to a certain extent if I am to follow through with the experience. In short, virtual reality is a form of theatre, and within it we ask our audience to be more than audience ö we ask them to be actor (there are some wonderful exceptions to this, in which the virtual environment simply becomes a performance space for an audience to passively and happily watch). Some agree to this request and stay with the piece, especially if the setup prohibits them from leaving, such as in the CAVE. Others do not and give up very quickly, particularly in screen-based pieces in gallery settings in which the average time spent on any other traditional work is perhaps 10 seconds.

Should the physical need to continue to inform the virtual? Or has it done too much of that already?