Virtualizing Los Angeles: Pierre Levy, <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Shield</Emphasis>, and http://theshieldrap.proboards45.com/

I explore how Pierre Levy’s virtualization works between actual places, television, and the Internet by referencing the real landscapes of Los Angeles, the visualized landscapes of the FX network television show The Shield, and the cyberscapes of . Unlike current Deleuzean-based theories of visualization that privilege the passage from the virtual to the actual, Levy focuses instead on how virtualization moves back from the real/actual toward the virtual. I argue that this philosophical reversal illustrates the way in which the virtual constitutes the viewer/consumer and thus functions to resituate the virtual within the body through the use of digital landscapes. I further argue, using The Shield as the modality, that the virtual is necessarily an element of the very body which it serves to constitute because the virtual is indeed an essential part of the determination of the geographies of every concrete biocultural body. My example of The Shield becomes the means by which we can bring the force of the virtual, in the form of web-based landscapes, to bear on our experience. I use the show and its Internet counterpart as the catalyst for an expansion of the margin of indetermination constitutive of our technically-facilitated embodiment. By further relating the TV show to our seemingly playful interactions with the digital landscape, I explore how this interaction crosses multiple scales and multiple viewing modalities and further blurs the borders of experiential reality and the visualization of fantasized landscapes. The Shield’s representations of the Los Angeles landscape become embodied experiences for viewers of the show and by virtualizing the real landscapes of Los Angeles and their televisual counterparts, allows consumers to know the spaces of the city through their virtual experience of place as imagined by the website and its members. Thus, I show how Levy’s virtualization theories can be used to specify the virtual dimension constitutive of human experience.