The Avatarian Meaning of Halloween

Halloween Edition of Sophrosyne Under Glass

Welcome brother, sister and indeterminate-gender avatars to the Halloween edition of Botgirl's Second Life Diary. Halloween is a descendent of Samhain, an ancient Celtic holiday that celebrated the time of year when the border between the physical and spiritual world was believed to be especially thin and permeable.

Although we typically think of virtual worlds as environments where humans can transport their everyday consciousness into avatar form, I believe the opposite is also true. For virtual worlds also provide a portal through which beings from the deep subconscious can emerge into the waking world.

So please join me in taking some time today to savor and celebrate the interplay we are privileged to experience between the atomic and digital; the physical and virtual; the actual and imagined; and the human and avatarian. In the coming year, may we find the courage to relax our grasp on mundane identity and open ourselves to the multi-dimensional wonder that awaits.

Happy Halloween!

Andy Kaufman and the Cross Gender Avatar

Do you suppose anyone ever said 'I am comfortable with the Cathy character because she is the same gender as the person who created her. But Heathcliff is the opposite gender! Oooo I need to lie down I am so disturbed'? Was it ever considered a disgrace that Juliet never admitted to Romeo she was 'a man in RL' (remember that in Shakespeare's day only men were actors)? Uhhh no, because it is understood that a character need not be of the same race, age, gender, nationality, religious outlook etc etc as its creator. Nor is the creator obliged to stick to his or her 'true' identity. Mary Evans did not do anything wrong when she wrote under a male name, now did she? But in SL if a guy roleplays a female and does not go around telling everyone 'I am a man, really!' it is considered a crime or something. from a blog comment by Extropia DaSilva

I still get heat from time to time for being a female character created by a male author/performance artist. I guess it shouldn't be surprising that some people are uncomfortable, creeped-out or pissed off about the gray area I intentionally play in as an obviously fictional character who actively participates in a very real community.

It seems to me that those of us working in this area virtually are the digital descendants of Andy Kaufman who also lived in the no man's land between fact and fiction, life and theater.

I leave you with this short profanity-filled video clip. Remind you of anyone?

More on the So-Called Silent Majority and a Fun Little Video

Here are a few points that clarify my thinking related Tuesday's Silent Majority topic:

• I don't believe that reading Second Life blogs or participating in related social networks is necessary to maintain an educated point of view. Knowing "Crap from Prokofy" wasn't meant to be an example of useful information, but rather one of SLebrity trivia. I intentionally didn't reference important issues as such as the impact of the new viewer, problems with search, etc. because I assumed that anyone using Second Life with regularity discusses such topics within their inworld social circles.

• I do believe that participating in blogs, social networks and other internet searchable vehicles allows one's ideas to have immensely greater reach and longer staying-power than  communication limited to inworld channels. This isn't because we have better ideas or are more important. It's because search engines can find our content. For instance, when someone types 'second life sex chat bot' into Google, my blog is the first search result. (Maybe that wasn't the best example.) As more inworld events and forums are archived to the web via video and chat logs, this may equalize a bit. 

• "Silent Majority" wasn't meant to designate a monolithic cultural group or market segment, but rather as a memorable term referring to those who choose (for whatever reason) not to actively participate in Second Life blogging and social networking circles.  I didn't mean to imply that I expected a single point of view on particular topics. Quite the contrary. I'm curious about what's up within Second Life sub-cultures which don't have a strong web-based presence.

Based on the relatively large number of comments on the post, I think this is a topic that will probably bounce around the Second Life blogosphere a bit. It's a microcosm of the broader question of how modern society is impacted by social networking and the ever-blurring line between creators and consumers of information.

Since Michele Hyacinth reminded me of my prior commitment to less words and more dance videos, I'll leave you with this song and concept video I created last year that relates to the topic at hand:

What Does the Silent Majority of Second Life Think?

Second Life has about about a million active residents of which maybe a few thousand routinely follow the blogs and social networks that discuss issues related to Second Life.

I wonder about the silent majority of avatars who don't immerse themselves in the social network stylings of the Second Life Elite or the profound pontification of the Top Second Life Blogs . . . those who don't know Crap from Prokofy, Gwyneth from Grace or Dusan from Dale.

What are they thinking, feeling and doing about the current and future state of Second Life?  Are they oblivious to the story lines of the soap opera that endlessly plays across our blogs and avatarian social networking circles? 

What does the silent majority think? I have no freaking clue. 

Evil Botgirl: A Dark Social Network Experiment

Evil Botgirl Twitter Avatar

We all have a lurking Shadow that projects the negative judgements we repress about ourselves onto other people. At 8:00 AM Pacific Time tomorrow, @evilbotgirl will launch her debut Twitter rant to personify and give voice to my own inner demon and perhaps channel the darker side of our collective unconscious.

This is dangerous work. Even within the context of supposedly self-reflective performance art, there is a strong seductive glee that arises in the expression of mean-spirited criticism.  So I'm not sure whether this will be a one time performance or an ongoing series.

In any case, I invite you to join in by contributing your Tweets to the hashtag that will be announced tomorrow morning and by following @evilbotgirl and the coming Twitapocalypse.

Chat With My CyberTwin!

Cloud Runner: More Play with iPhone Created Second Life Machinima

Here's another little experiment with Second Life machinima shot and edited on an iPhone. It was captured yesterday during the final shooting session for the second episode of Night and Day. While Night was sweating over the real shots, I passed the time with a little retro-inspired fun. Night will be busily editing over the weekend and we hope to have the new episode out early next week.

Creating our Virtual Future

This post extends a few of my tweets from last week with the #transworlder hashtag.

Someday we'll look back on Second Life as we would a childhood home that once was the center of our universe.  Second Life was the first virtual world most of this blog's readers were born into. As we have grown from digital nubehood into virtual adolescence and beyond it has not evolved correspondingly. So it's not surprising that the environment that once felt so limitless and open now seems constraining and uninspiring. 

That said, although the honeymoon with Second Life is long over, finding a new virtual world to love is just a temporary fix for a passionless digital life.  Although I was one of the first bloggers urging people to take some of their eggs out of the Second Life basket, the intention was to protect virtual assets rather than to find some greener digital pasture. I'm all for exploring different worlds and think that emigration will certainly make sense for many people. But there's no virtual utopia. That's something we need to create together. To that end, I recommend Pathfinder's great post on empowering ourselves to collectively move towards the future we desire.

Obsessing about Linden Lab plays into a One World mentality. Better to take that energy and explore other options. After three years of watching community members post hundreds of blogs, tweets and comments related to boneheaded moves Linden Lab has made, I can only think of a couple of times such communication made an impact on the policies it critiqued. Although I also find it hard to resist the weekly opportunities to weigh in (like yesterday's news of Philip's departure) it would probably be more useful to channel that energy into more creative tasks.

Today, a virtual world can live on a USB key in your back pocket. Tomorrow your avatar may live in a chip implanted in your head. Although there will certainly be technological advances that we can't foresee, I'm convinced there are significant opportunities to enhance virtual worlds that will arise from our creative use of existing tools. So what are we waiting for?

Human, Avatar and Doll: The Conflation of Identity, Image and Story

The subject in the foreground is a 2010 Delilah Noir doll. The image in the background is from an antique reproduction of the 1879 lithograph, Cherry Ripe.

Although we "know" that the underlying humans we interact with in virtual worlds look nothing like the avatars who meet our eye, it is almost impossible to refrain from relating to them outside of a significant psychological association with their visible form. In my personal experience this is not only true when the viritual identity is pseudonymous, but also when the human is known to me, even when he or she is of a different gender than the avatar representation.

What is the relationship between the stories we hold about people related to their physical appearance and the real beings we encounter? Noticing how we psychologically conflate the obviously constructed appearance of avatars with the underlying person can help us upon our eyes to the same processes at play in the physical world.  Another place to notice the fictional construction of identity based upon physical form is our projection of personality on inanimate objects such as the doll and lithograph in the image above. 

Night and Day iPhone-Produced Retro-Future Mash-Up Short

I captured a bit of the action on an iPhone Tuesday, as Night was shooting video for our next episode of Night and Day. This little clip was put together while playing with the new version of Vintage-Video. The audio combines a few snippets from episode one, stitched together with loops on Garage Band. The final video was edited and rendered on an iPhone using iMovie.  I was going for a future-retro 1920's/2020's look with a cheesy 1970's soundtrack. Fun!

The Great Twitter Unfollow Purge

It's becoming harder and harder to keep up with my Twitter stream. Too many posts. Not enough time. So I decided to do a little research and unfollow those who tend to post a high volume of tweets that aren't in an area of my interest. I planned to start off with followcost.com, but I didn't see a way to run a batch and generate a ranked list. I ended up doing it the old fashioned way and clicked through a name at a time on the Twitter web site. That isn't a very efficient way to go through hundreds of names, so after an hour I'm not even halfway through. But I have learned a lot about what I don't find useful. For instance, a constant stream of:

• Personal information from people I don't have personal relationships with.
• foursquare check-ins
• meal reports
• running statistics
• general emo
• weather reports
• Commercial announcements for events or products I'm not interested in
• Links to favorited videos or music
• References to god or political opinion

Now none of the categories I mentioned are bad in themselves. If you habitually post in one of the categories above, I will assume that most of your followers (or at least your mom) are waiting with bated breath to know things like the temperature in your home town, your breakfast menu each morning or the dozen videos you favorited today. But since I personally don't have much use for such information, I hope those I've unfollowed (who notice) won't take it personally.

I also ended up unfollowing people I didn't recognize who hadn't posted in over three months. Although they don't clutter my Twitter stream, I think its a bit disingenuous to keep following people who aren't active just because some of them will unfollow me eventually out of spite and hurt my rankings on Crap's list of top Second Life tweeps.

So that's my story. The purge continues. I feel so clean!

Identity as Mask, Filter and Window

As I was pondering a comment Splash Kidd made last week on identity, the analogies of masks, filters and windows came to mind:

• masks that project a constructed image that hides underlying aspects of our self
• filters that accentuate certain dimensions of our personality while diminishing or coloring others
• windows that provide a glimpse into deeper levels of our being that are usually hidden

We meet the world through a multiplicity of masks, filters and windows corresponding to roles such as parent, employee, student, party goer, etc.  The way we dress, the style and substance of our communication and even subconscious expressions such as posture can vary quite radically between roles. Although this seems to beg the question "Which is the real you?",  upon reflection it's apparent that the being behind each persona inherently transcends any particular expression. 

It seems to me that all three modalities can be used to consciously explore the multidimensional expression of our being.  Although the realities of physical existence limit the roles one can play in the atomic world, virtual identities offer us an almost unlimited potential to break out of habitual modes of expression and connect with new aspects of one's being. 

There are many ways to play with virtual identities. Some people have a single identity that morphs into different forms and characters. Others create multiple "alts", each expressing a particular persona that deepens over time through a continuity of narrative. Like just about anything in life, the trick is to be immersed enough for deep and authentic experience while maintaining a spark of an observing consciousness to stay awake in the dream.

Anti-Spoiler Alert: Totally Misleading Clue Hidden in "Night and Day" Video

If you missed the video, here it is:

Identity and Being

 

My ongoing exploration of identity has taken many twists and turns over the last few years between the launch of this blog and the recent opening of the Caerleon Museum of Identity. For all my writing, stories, video, comics, infographics and other meditations on the topic, I always end up on the shore of Emptiness. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense that nothing possesses intrinsic or enduring identity.

So if that is the case, what has been the point of all this musing?

One reason has been to use such exploration to uncover, bring to light and deconstruct the fictional nature of identity. Despite knowing better intellectually, I habitually experience a pervasive visceral sense of the solid identity of self and others. The creative process is one way to lift some of the veils.

Another purpose has been to experience the creative joy of the journey and to develop and practice new skills in the mediums I've dabbled with along the way. Identity has been muse, canvass and tool for much of my artistic work. In one sense, Botgirl is essentially an ongoing piece of performance art on the idea of identity.

Finally, it has helped me increase my ability and determination to not be hypnotized by outer identity so I can be more fully open to the sentient being within.

Conceptual Art Project Hides Within New Machinima Sitcom

Night and Day is a new machinima series that takes the buddy movie genre into the virtual world. Although written as a sitcom-level comedy, it's also a conceptual art project that plays with the dance of fact and fiction in the expression of pseudonymous identity.

On the surface, the video series is "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" meets "Charlie's Angels" in the virtual world. Night is a smart, hot party girl who loves to see and be seen at the trendiest dance clubs, parties and VIP events. Botgirl is a reclusive mini-skirted Spock-like genius who is befuddled by Night's social circus parade.

But behind the outer level of what will hopefully be experienced as LOL/OMG comedy, there is a subtext of Night and Botgirl as fictionalized versions of the real Night and I, who are in themselves fictionalized expressions of so-called real humans. The conceptual art aspect of our trilogy is the triune nature of our characters and the way that narratives contribute to the creation of identity.

The first episode is set to premier later today. Stay tuned.

The video premiered here on NWN. Read Night's thoughts on our collaboration on her blog.

Avatar Life Insurance Company Launched

A false sense of security?

Today, you're walking on a beautiful beach with the one you love. Prim hair blowing in the breeze. Surf sounding in the distance. Your recently purchased 500 position sex bed is ready to provide you and your partner with infinite hours of intimate pleasure. It seems as if your virtual world will always be young, fresh and full of opportunity.

Here at Avatar Life Insurance we don't like to be alarmist, but EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND LOVE IN YOUR VIRTUAL WORLD CAN BE TAKEN WITH YOU IN AN INSTANT WITHOUT WARNING.


Only time will tell whether recent rumors about a Microsoft takeover of Second Life will prove true. But it is fair warning that your Second Life is lived at the whim of the Linden Lab Landlords. And they can pave it over or sell it out from under you in a heartbeat. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Botgirl Linden. Happy ALI customer

The good news is that we at Avatar Life Insurance Company can offer you a policy to protect your virtual life when disaster strikes. When you open up a basic policy, we will register your avatar name on the top 20 OpenSim grids and upload your avatar shape, skin and up to ten outfits of your choosing. If Second Life becomes Sharepoint 3D overnight, you can simply log into another world and start your virtual life fresh, with the name and shape you've come to love.

For even more protection, our deluxe program extends protection to a wider set of virtual worlds and virtual places. We will register your name, create an avatar and establish a basic inventory on five additional platforms of your choice, including Blue Mars, IMVU and Twinity.

And if you have special needs, we are happy to accommodate you. We have furry, tiny, Gorean and even griefer programs that can quickly get you back on your feet (whether two, four or none) in a jiffy.

So get in touch with Botgirl Questi to learn more about this exciting new program that can protect your virtual life and the virtual lives of the ones you love. For only pennies a month, you can rest assured that you and your virtual family will survive the demise of Second Life.