Nationally - internationally - we believe in this cyberspace which was first crystallized in Neuromancer and which is made up, in that text, of two elements; firstly simstim - a remote experience of the entire sensory input of another person; and secondly a dynamic 3D interface into the thrilling realm of protected computer domains that visualizes encryption codes, the codes that are trying to break them, and the relationship between the two. The conflation of these two elements gives us a realm of virtual reality - a dream-world created (for example) from your memories but which is virtually indistinguishable from reality.

To return to that mundane reality: Instead of simstim we have the CAVE, or other VR devices that attach maybe as many as four trackers to a user and can tell, in real time, where those tracked parts are, and which can integrate that information into an interactive VR application. A few people in both the arts and science have experimented with using the user's blood pressure, breathing, facial movements, to feedback into the program, but the gap between these experiments and simstim is phenomenal.

How real is the other part of the fantasy: the dynamic, 3D visualization of the "ice"? The thing that is so utterly frustrating about using computer code to visualize is that you are creating from scratch. Which means anything is possible, but that the work involved in making it is enormous. Often, when people enter a  VR piece and discover that they can go through the walls - they think that the designer made it that way - but really creating collision detection to stop you going through the walls is where the problems lie. In the computer you are not given an up or a down, gravity, solidity, physics - any of that you have to build in.

Exciting! Boundless! Boundaryless - isn't that how it sounds and isn't that exactly what that the cyberspace fantasy is hinting at? No, instead we arrive back at the point that without some structures, without some value placed on some things rather than others, we get a complete loss of complexity, a world of meaningless atoms - nothing.

Face it. What we do when confronted with nothing or with formlessness is find patterns in it. That's what we do. We're humans and humans are pattern finders for survival. And so what we drag into our limitless VR are just some of the patterns that exist outside. And that's OK, it has a lot of potential - we can visualize and interact with molecular structures, model turbulence if we work hard at all the maths, model behavior maybe. VR ideally brings us into the realm of the very small, the very big, the very fast, the very hidden and models them and shows us their patterns. But if we spend all our time and energy on visual recreations of human-scale real life - the dream of cyberspace -I think we miss the point and make ourselves a lot of work.

All of Gibson's "ice" (the encryption programs and the programs that break them), is exactly that ice - a fractal form that grows. And yes we can make a program that visualizes fractals - and yes its not hard to imagine an encryption program that uses the principle of recursion as its motor - and yes perhaps that encryption program could have a graphic interface which showed the "ice" growing and the user would play with these graphics to control the process of decoding. And then?

Computers are programmed in code that at the most basic level is a long string of 1s and 0s. Cyberspace is the fantasy of making all that code visible - bringing it out of the digital world back into the analog and giving us patterns to work with intuitively instead of all that mind-numbing logic. In this way cyberspace is a fantasy that comforts, it suggests that inside the computer is a hidden world that we can understand visually, that the the 1s and 0s have found a way of communicating with us directly.

Escapism is the other lure of cyberspace. It promises a vicarious life which digs deeper than the imagination and literally tweaks our nervous system and physicality, but still without bringing us into any danger. At this level, even if we end up with a map of the world that covers the world, I think wanting the whole holodeck has validity.

O n the other hand it's going to be a long time coming.