More than the mere
understanding of new
technologies, the way
of understanding
characteristics of the
Web age is through
observation of human
nature: to feel the
impact of the silent
consideration of key
concepts such as time,
space, and memory.

September + October 2009

[ 4] Bell, G. and J. Gray. “Digital Immortality.” Communications of the ACM 44, 3 (2001): 28-31.

interactions

standing of new realities. The fascination with virtual reality and computer games was shown in “The Matrix,” where robots rule the planet and keep humans plugged into a virtual world. However, the work of Bioy Casares predates the Wachovski brothers’ story by half a century.

Love stories reflect deep human values and could be viewed as a rich context for exploring the intricacies of an era in which technology gradually replaces tasks that were the privilege of man and nature. The Invention of Morel describes the romance of two lovers that coexist spatially in two different temporal dimensions. Bioy Casares’s theme has become ever more relevant to a modern society bound to images

and videos that are becoming a dominant form of content on the Web. The search for eternal love weaves an unexpected story, intertwined by ingredients essentially human—jealousy, uncertainty, fear, hope, and solitude—and having a virtual world as scenery. It is a story told with irony, marked with metaphysical questions about life, death, and eternity. And it pushes the reader to speculate on the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Bioy Casares relies upon a virtual world, in which all the characters, except the narrator, are copies of human beings and objects of nature.

“These walls—like Faustine, Morel, the fish of the aquarium, one of the suns, one of the moons, the book by Belidor—are projections of the machines.”

The quest for immortality and eternal love led Morel to create a virtual reality, with ideas that float today as real possibilities backed by scientific and technological developments.

“With my machine a person or animal or a thing is like the station that broadcasts the concert you hear on the radio. If you turn the dial for the olfactory waves, you will smell the jasmine perfume on Madeleine’s throat, without seeing her.”

And the project of Morel has evolved along this line.

“But if you turn all the dials at once, Madeleine will be reproduced completely and she will appear exactly as she is; you must not forget I am speaking of images extracted from mirrors.... An observer will not realize they are images.”

As the technology evolves, computing and networking technologies will be able to provide enough computational power to

create virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing, like ‘Matrix”-style simulated realities. In the story, the narrator becomes confused with the copies and makes the following comment: “I do not know which flies are real and which ones are artificial.”

In order to support the growing integration of physical systems and computing, novel visions will be a key factor in understanding the new environments. The cyber-physical systems are bound to create pervasive systems that will profoundly shift the way humans interact with things, such as robots truly interacting with people.

To keep the lovers together, Morel conceived his plan.

“We shall live in this photograph forever. Imagine a stage on which our life during these seven days is acted out, completed in every detail. We are the actors. All our actions have been recorded.”

A published scientific project proposed what was called “digital immortality” [ 4]. The central point is the real possibility of storing all the information a person has seen, read, heard, or talked about during his or her lifetime. This would pave the way to a partial immortality, where a person would be reduced to a mass of information and preserved through the storage of digital information. Thus the “information side” of a person is eternal and can even be copied indefinitely. In the novel, the narrator—the only human being alive on the island—realizes that his interaction with Faustine occurred in a virtual world and observed:

“To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most