SITELESS operates in the lineage of what Erik Davis calls imaginal machines—technologies that open a threshold between illusion and revelation, where the artificial becomes a stage for the supernatural. From the printing press to the laterna magica, from photography to cinema, each medium generated its own mode of haunting. The rise of spiritism alongside early photographic technology is only the most visible example. If VR is the newest imaginal machine, then it, too, must provide a unique access to its own form of the uncanny—one specific to our era and its longing. That longing, perhaps, is the experience of one’s own absence.

Every virtual environment—no matter how minimal or complex—forms a perfectly coherent world. The sole exception to its logic is the user’s presence within it. In VR, we are the radical anomaly: the ghosts, the intruders, the visitors to a world that is not ours. VR grants what Eugen Thacker describes as an encounter with the world-without-us, a realm suspended between the Kantian world-for-us and the inaccessible world-in-itself. Here, the mind faces a paradox: if Descartes asked how thought can understand the world while being part of it, VR inverts the question—how can the mind experience a world of which it is no longer a part? Who is the one perceiving: an “I,” or rather an asynchronous and virtual copy of the self? In VR, the mind stands outside the world it perceives: the moment we enter a virtual space, that world becomes real—while our own presence becomes virtual.