## 1 Aesthetic Specificity In 2016 Werner Herzog made the following remarks about the potential of virtual reality as an artistic medium: >I am convinced that this [virtual reality]is not going to be an extension of cinema or 3-D cinema or video games. It is something new, different, and not experienced yet [...] normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture—like, let's say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney—and technology makes it possible to fulfil these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don't have any clear idea how to fill it with content (Werner Herzog, in Patrick House (2016), 'Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality', The New Yorker) One way of interpreting what he is saying is as follows: we do not yet know what is medium specific about VR. What, if anything, does this technology make possible that no other artistic medium can? Medium specificity can be made clearer by considering the following remarks from Noel Carrol on the advent of film, and how it differed to theatre: > However, even if cinema could deliver art to its audiences, was it an art form in its own right or merely theater in a can—that is, a film can? In other words, was film only a recording device, relaying whatever transpired theatrically before the camera to audiences, or did it have an original artistic contribution of its own to make?"  (2021, p. 23) We can imagine a theatre director learning about film for the first time thinking something like 'Great, now I can just have my actors perform the play once, and people can watch it wherever there is a cinema screen'. While direct recordings of plays certainly take place, just thinking of film as 'theatre in a can' is to overlook all the other possibilities that film allows for that theatre does not. Shooting on film allows for cuts, so that the same scene can be seen from multiple angles, it allows for montage, tracking shots, smash cuts, and many other effects not possible in the theatre. Such features contribute to film's medium specificity, and have been used by filmmakers for unique aesthetic and artistic effects. We can think of similar sorts of contrast between music played live and recorded music. The latter is much more than a concert in a can: it allows stereo effects, layering of multiple tracks, and the ability to manipulate sound in post-production. For example, the stereo effect of the aeroplane sound travelling across the stereo field in The Beatles' 'Back in the U.S.S.R.' would be extremely difficult to recreate accurately in a live setting. Despite a resurgence in popularity, the term ‘virtual reality’ was first used in the 1980s, and since that time has been used for things like films (e.g. The Great C; Clouds Over Sidra), dance performances (e.g. Gilles Jobin's 'VR_I'), and video games. However, these examples essentially transfer existing art forms into virtual environments and little more —akin to putting theatre, dance, or gameplay in virtual cans. If VR has unique, medium specific characteristics, pieces like these, regardless of any other merits that might have, do not take advantage of them.  In this paper we will suggest a hitherto unconsidered possibility about the medium specificity of VR: its technical set up (lenses close to the eyes, real-time head tracking, etc.) allows for the alteration of structural features of perceptual experience. In the next section we will briefly consider another feature that is sometimes suggested as a possible aesthetic specificity of VR: immersion. While our arguments will not be conclusive, we will suggest that this is a dead end, as immersion is a feature of the real world, so it is a mistake to think that it can be used to explain how VR is unique. In part 2, we will introduce the idea that perceptual modalities have structurally invariant features, before going on to provide cases in which these invariant features can be altered through technological intervention. In part 3, we will argue that VR is unique in that it is the only artistic medium which allows for the structural properties of perceptual experience to be altered. We will show how this works by considering real-life cases, as well as other possibilities that the VR set up of lenses close to the eyes and motion tracking allows for. In part 4, we will suggest that VR's capacity to alter the structural properties of perceptual experience is not limited to visual perception. One aspect of VR that one might be tempted into thinking contributes to its specificity is immersion. VR can place users in detailed and otherworldly virtual environments and we might think that this is what sets VR it apart from other media. While there may be something to this it will not be the focus of this article. One reason to be wary of taking this path is that there are other forms of art which are immersive: architecture and installation art immerse spectators in virtue of their being part of actual reality, and so we might think that virtual immersion is, more or less, ‘installation art in a can’, or ‘architecture in a can’. A possible response to that one could make here is that VR allows for immersion in impossible worlds which violate logic or physical laws, but it remains to be seen if VR can really provide such experiences, or if such experiences are really that unique. For these reasons, we will focus here on a different candidate for aesthetic specificity.