Layers Of Reality: The Concept Of Inter Orbis
World in Three Different Layers of Reality
The Allegory of the Planetarium is the visualization of the Feedback Loop that we are living in. In this model the characteristic dome represents the seemingly infinite of the internet. The physical world is represented by the spectators, while the Inter Orbis is the projector which is directed towards the cupola. In the first step the tangible world is feeding the projector with information of experiences of the ‚real'. This will then be projected inside the dome. This reflection – the internet – is what we see as the spectators what in return will inform us again and so on. Now the circle can start again. In this model the internet – so, the dome – functions as a metaphorical projection surface which is mirroring our society. Everything we can see on the internet finds its origin in the tangible or ‚the real‘ world. So, it just shows us what we could have seen already. This makes the internet not to a separate space but a layer or a component of the real. Both the internet and the Inter Orbis inform and get informed by the tangible world. Now we have to ask ourselves: is this Plato speaking to us in the 21st century? Is what we see even real – or is it just a projection from the virtual space? Do we still live in a cage?
Fiction and Virtual Fiction
Another interesting and relevant part of the Inter Orbis is Fiction – which is not just storytelling anymore. In the book Fiction As Method the editors Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison (2017) show us how powerful fiction can be: At the center of the world there is a fiction; a fictional piece of land a meter wide by a meter long. It has not been thrown up from the depths; not from the violence of lava bursting up and cooling, though there is a violence in its history. It is called Null Island, and you cannot travel there. Fictions are actual things that do exist in our world. They became an operative part of our everyday life, a possibility to create alternatives to what ‚is‘. This fictional land, Null Island – the point where the equator meets the prime meridian – shows us how something fictional can become part of our reality. Zero degrees latitude and longitude confuses computers, they need a piece of land to ground their calculations, so we fed them with a fiction. The location is in the Gulf of Guinea off the west African coast, where actually just a lonely weather buoy is floating in the sea.
Tracking systems that are unable to locate something would automatically redirect it to this exact spot. It is a man-made piece of land at the origin of the world where no man has ever set foot on. Just a story we made up to keep computers going. And in return they run the numbers for our GPS, guiding us home safely at night, leading us to shoals of fish to eat. From this unreal center, the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction.
We are transported home via this fictional island; the missiles our governments launch in our names track abstract lines of their trajectories through it. From there, where the world begins. This is how Null Island became one of the most visited places on earth – theoretically. In 1940 Jorge Luis Borges wrote his longest short story: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The whole story contains many references to real and existing people, places, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or obscure ones.
The story tells about the author’s – Borges himself – discovery of a fictional and mystical world called Tlön, when reading about it in a book. Eventually, it turns out that a secret society of conspirators convened to invent this planet. In this universe the profane inhabitants are immaterialistic idealists, denying the reality of the world. In the 14 volume encyclopedia Orbis Tertius the planet would be describes to the smallest detail, including everything that one would expect a planet to contain. Its philosophies, terrains and landscapes, its zoology, politics, history and poetry – so rich in detail that it would be almost impossible to determine whether the planet really existed or not.
Towards the end of the story more and more objects and personas from this imaginative space would pop up in the, allegedly, real world – slowly taking over it. “Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön” is how Borges (1961) writes it in his story telling us that fiction can eventually become real. Just as philosopher Baudrillard predicts years later, Borges alludes to the fact that we can never say with certainty, that what we experience is the real, tangible world. We might just live in another, second reality – a hyperreality.
