This Is the Most Fucked Up Virtual World Ever Devised

Yann Minh is wearing a brain wave-detecting headset retrofitted with a pair of white robotic cat ears. They jerk around as Minh speaks, tuned to the electrical signals in his brain, and nicely compliment his gray biker 'stache and black scarf emblazoned with white skulls.

Minh is giving me a tour of his virtual reality "Noomuseum," a psychedelic cyberpunk exploration into the seedy bowels of media theory, Minh's own interests and desires, and, of course, the internet in all its hyper-sexual cyberpunk glory.

As I wander through the space, I see a virtual, genderless human avatar with a slew of white robots huddling over it. They're fondling its chest and pleasuring its genitals. I go further into the world, and I am beamed up to a space station from an old wooden ship with a genderless cyber super-being as a captain.

The virtual reality Noomuseum is on display at the IX Symposium for immersive experience in Montreal, but according to Minh, it's actually a teaching tool that he uses in the classes he teaches at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, France, the city he calls home. I guess I could see it. Walking around the virtual environment, which looks like an Unreal Tournament map, I spy a gallery of classical art amid the digital neon and gray steel.

Here, Minh tells me how he became the first to discover a secret in Diego Velázsquez's famous 1656 painting Las Meninas after digitizing it for virtual reality: a secret door in the castle depicted by the artist. I have no idea if this claim is true or not, but the person next to me exclaimed in French, "Formidable!" when they heard it.

The bizarre spectacle of the "Noomuseum" is all part of the "Noosphere," an idea that Minh had when he learned about the internet in 1996 after decades of working as a cyberpunk visual artist. His first installation was in 1979 at the American Center in Paris. Minh calls himself a "noonaut," which he describes as a brave explorer of digital seas of information, like a ship captain.

"Like a sailor, the artist explores the spheres of information," Minh told me. "We, as artists, are specialists of the spheres of information. First, of cyberspace, and cyberspace is information in a rational way of thinking. Artists also explore the Noosphere, the metaphysical, the mysterious, and cyberspace is inside the Noosphere."

Virtual reality is a new frontier for Minh, and the first version of the Noomuseum was designed in 2003. When I asked Minh what he thought of virtual reality technology today, he was more than optimistic, ecstatic. His exact quote is too long and circuitous to reprint here, but it had to do with card and driving and "expanding" our consciousness on to machines. The next frontier, he tells me, is physical feedback—a technology known as haptics.

"Maybe, we are arriving at a future where information exchange in cyberspace will be more realistic, more precise, and more sensational," Minh said . "What's interesting is the next step: physical feedback. Not just eyes and ears, but physical stimulation. At the moment, the connective implication is immense, of course, for cybersex."

The only downside Minh saw to all of this was that we'd never want to get up from our chairs again, and get diabetes from eating too much junk food while immobile.

Before my tour of the Noomusem was over, I succumbed to the notorious phenomenon of "virtual reality sickness"—the feeling of nausea after spending around 10 minutes in a VR headset. I took off my headset and apologized. Minh seemed unperturbed.

Somehow, I feel like nausea is exactly what he wants people to experience inside the Noosphere.