Virtual Places

This chapter progresses from considering the treatment of actual places within flow research to exploring engagements with virtual places—places that are phenomenologically experienced but that do not exist, such as fictional, painted or digital worlds—through detailed comparison between artistic and digital environments, to initiate theoretical work on how flow can be generative of such spatial experiences. Beginning with different approaches to the aesthetic illusion, as a sense of being in an artwork, discussion progresses to examine different notions or types of presence as articulated in research on digital environments to unsettle both any simple conflation of flow and presence as extreme versions of each other and any notion that presence makes digital media unique as a space of flow experiences. Instead, I propose that flow and presence are distinguished by their signature combinations of spatial, physical and self- transformation. In addition, flow is reaffirmed as an inherently spatial phenomenon, and an invitation is issued to pursue further empirical work in this direction with emphasis on the bodily, practical, material and pre-reflective aspects of flow.