The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality ed. by Mark Grimshaw (review)

Gilles Deleuze, arguably the best-known theorist of virtuality, describes the virtual as part of an ontology of becoming and multiplicity: he sees the virtual as a characteristic of being which is directly opposed to, but simultaneously constitutive of the actual aspect of reality, as a force that works mostly invisibly, but powerfully within the interstices of the material world, introducing constant flux into reality through its negotiations with the actual.¹ This conception of the virtual represents something of a leitmotif for the forty-four essays collected in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. The collection offers a wide range of approaches to virtuality as a philosophical and aesthetic concept as well as a technological reality, emphasizing the continuities between the two.