In the book Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative , an impossible space is defined as a place the reader cannot understand; for example, a house that is smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. The impossibility of understanding is “not a matter of missing information but a matter of radical ontological difference (25).”

So what would it mean to place a user in an impossible space? If it’s a matter of ontological difference, then present them with a paradigm that is not only unusual, but with new existing relationships between their parts. I believe my theatre might do this: (1) it is an almost empty, dark place with no conventional entertainment and (2) the relationships set-up will have no reference in the physical world. Characters are doubled, including the protagonist, the screen is the object of observation and less of a passive consumption, and in a more cheeky twist movie posters around the concession stand will poke fun at existing modes of entertainment (MARVEL at U.S. Corporate Values or Token Moody Foreign Film). The idea is for the almost mirror image of this center of consumption to put the original in question and re-imagine relationships between ourselves and ourselves, ourselves and others, and ourselves and art/entertainment.

Another point of departure from a possible space is the painterly aesthetic. All models will be painted in TiltBrush with the bristle brush, that most similar to traditional media. This should give the space an impressionistic feeling that alerts you of the impossibility of what you’re experiencing being “real”. Since the impossibility we’re positing is inherently ontological, this should make the user question definitions of reality and perhaps consider the value of “in-between”, impossible places for a re-shifting of existing paradigms and consequent evolution (or devolution).

Now here’s a feeling worthy of pursuing in VR:
…no matter where we are, we are at a place connected to everywhere else in the world, a place where all roads come together (33).

This is reminiscent of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths where the narrator discovers his ancestor has written a bifurcating novel:

Naturally, my attention was caught by the sentence, ‘I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths: I had no sooner read this, than I understood. The Garden of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel itself. The phrase ‘to various future times, but not to all’ suggested the image of bifurcating in time, not in space. Rereading the whole work confirmed this theory. In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel (emphasis my own).

Anything that is impossible ontologically must involve a contradiction. Contradictions are the first sign of evolution: the existence of a former state by that of a present or future state. Contradiction as feeling is not very comfortable, perhaps for the same reason that ontological shifts are not very comfortable. VR could reframe our experiences and possibly create the illusion that every new experience is related to all others–

Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me . . .