Entering Real Virtuality: Transgressing Virtual Reality Through Heidegger, Harman, and Avant-Garde Art

Does digital technology liberate or imprison? This article confronts Heidegger’s diagnosis of technology as enframing —the reduction of beings to calculable resources—by asking whether digital culture is doomed to confinement or capable of opening unforeseen freedoms. We argue that the answer hinges on where agency is located: a humanist ‘virtual reality’ perspective risks deepening enframing, while acknowledging non-human agents allows technology to exceed calculative closure. Turning to Heidegger’s notion of art as a ‘saving power,’ we propose analyzing avant-garde practices through two central Heideggerian strategies for revealing technology’s essence—brokenness and alienation—thereby seeing them as revelatory modes that dismantle habitual functions and disclose unthought potentials. Drawing on Graham Harman’s tool-being, yet rejecting his radical autonomy of objects, we point to the concept of ‘real virtuality’ (DeLanda) as a material potentiality exposed by art. Through Marcel Duchamp, surrealism, Fluxus, and Situationism, we trace how avant-garde art models ways whereby digital culture might escape enframing.