I've been playing around with embedding the clichéd concept of a missing person milk carton into a context related to the avatar disappeared. I'm just part of the way through the visual thinking, but wanted to share a few preliminary images and provide a window into my working process
The first image embeds a non-realistic carton into a professionally photographed RL kitchen. The second injects a somewhat ambiguously human/avatar Botgirl into the work, contemplating the carton.
I have a couple more iterations envisioned which I'll share here later this week. For now, if you click through to Flickr, you can see the high resolutions versions that reveal the photographic feel of the works.
Marshall McLuhan wrote that each new communication medium eventually transforms society's perception of those that came before. He also described how the combination of multiple clichés can transcend the individual origins and bring to light something fresh and new. I've been playing around with that idea for the past week and will be posting a series of images and brief essays around that idea.
I'm still resonating with ideas and images kicked up by a weekend watching Andy Warhol documentaries and Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop. I'm suddenly seeing the digital world as a pop art microcosm of the physical world. Looking closely, the shiny artifice of virtual life shifts into a funhouse mirror that reveals otherwise unseen aspects of human existence.
I was ready to be underwhelmed by Project Skylight, Second Life's new browser client beta. Just about every other "advancement" Linden Lab rolled out over the past few years has been mediocre or worse. But to my surprise, the new client user experience was exceptionally good from start to finish. First click to first rez took maybe a minute. The graphics quality and speed was as good or better than the traditional client I was running alongside. Although the current beta has limited functionality, basic capabilities such as movement, camera control, avatar selection and text chat were dead on.
The experience was so fast, easy and fun that I jumped to the astounding conclusion that Second Life could leap to mass market with one small addition: integration with Facebook. Just imagine that you could coax someone into Second Life as easily as an invitation to Mob Wars or Farmville and that they could be rezzed as an avatar using Facebook authentication in less than a minute. You could invite someone to a live music performance, an art opening or a birthday party and they could attend without a registration process or massive client download. Now that's a killer app!
I realize that this idea will likely cause shudders, nausea and murderous thoughts for many of my fellow veterans. Me too. If Second Life becomes filled with everyone's moms, high-school sweethearts and church buddies it is bound to radically alter the pseudonymous-friendly, freewheeling, tolerant culture we know and love. But in spite of that probability, I think that the long term interest of bringing the avatarian experience to the mainstream eclipses any short-time personal losses we may experience.
The work is an extension of an idea I started playing around with last year, using the ventriloquist/dummy relationship as a metaphor for human/avatar identity:
In the pseudonymous culture of Second Life an avatar's undisclosed human identity is often referred to as "Typist" or "Puppeteer". Since neither of those labels ever felt right to me, I was recently intrigued by the notion of using "Ventriloquist" as an alternative metaphor. Here's how I see the differences:
The Typist metaphor places agency within the virtual identity. The human is viewed as a third-party transcribing dictation with neither emotional involvement nor creative participation.
The Puppeteer metaphor casts the avatar as a doll on a string, manipulated by a human sitting outside and above the stage of the virtual world.
The Ventriloquist metaphor places the avatar intimately upon the human's lap. Human and Dummy are both active participants who are perceived as unique and vital individuals.
I'm pretty sure I'll return to the metaphor in future works and posts. For now, I'll leave you with Human, Me and Majic Makes Three a related video I created last September:
After a couple of weeks of pseudo-intelectual discussion about identity, it's time to take Michele Hyacinth's standing advice again to shut up and dance on the topic. This particular dance is a strange little surrealist trip that juxtaposes fluid avatar image deconstruction with a gospel song about identity. Hopefully you'll find it both fun and a bit disturbing.
During the break between episodes of Night and Day, I've been romancing a concept for a new micro-machinima. The idea revolves around the fluidity of identity as creative process. Over the weekend, I finally came up with a visual approach, which you can get a taste of in the image above.
Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble,
Ancient footprints are everywhere.
You can almost think that you're seein' double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece.
She promised that she'd be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.
Oh, the hours I've spent inside the Coliseum,
Dodging lions and wastin' time.
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see 'em,
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb.
Train wheels runnin' through the back of my memory,
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese.
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece.
Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola.
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!
I left Rome and landed in Brussels,
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried.
Clergymen in uniform and young girls pullin' muscles,
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside.
Newspapermen eating candy
Had to be held down by big police.
Someday, everything is gonna be diff'rent
When I paint my masterpiece.
This post collects and extends yesterday's tweets on #creativity
Self-censorship is best left for the morning after: It's 3 A.M. You've been flirting your ass off all night with a smoking piece of work. Suddenly, you realize that you're so intoxicated by passion that "art goggles" may be clouding your vision. You worry that in the cold hard light of morning you may wake to find that your brilliant new beauty is actually a worn-out monstrosity. Please don't fear! Take heart and consumate with wild abandon. You have been gifted by the Great Muse herself. At least for tonight.
Creativity is not my servant. I am hers.
Some people create to express their vision. I create to reveal what I have not yet seen.
Inspiration is a gift. Have you thanked your Muse today?
All art is collaborative because it rests upon eons of work by countless predecessors.
There is nothing free of cliché. There is nothing completely clichéd. Dig deeper because there is something inside of us longing to be born.
Play is creativity's natural habitat and passion her midwife.
It's true that you can't please everyone. But you can't offend everyone either. God save me from the lukewarm.
I leave you today with a fun little video from one of my human counterpart's blogs. It's a good RL example of the type of playful, ad-hoc creativity we enjoy in the virtual world.
Don't ask for whom the griefer label fits, it fits for thee.
When you say, I don't get why you people do/think/believe/want that, I get it:
I get that you haven't made a sincere effort to try to understand
I get that you freely misrepresent the "other side" to make your points
I get that you are interested in advocating your viewpoint, not discerning greater truth
And I get that I do the same damn thing.
The more I think about the question of griefers and trolls, the more I'm becoming sensitized to the way we all suffer internally from the very same qualities we disdain in others.
We express it publicly in blogs and social networks when we respond to others' thoughts in order to attack rather than to understand. We express it privately in conversations when we smugly point out the stupidity, immorality, wrong-headedness or other undesirable qualities of another group or individual.
As a matter of fact, I'm doing it right now. So, I'll shut up and leave you with St. Francis' prayer of peace:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
when there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying [to ourselves] that we are born to eternal life.
There was an interesting conversation in Twitter today around the question "what in Second Life offends you?" Even venerable CodeBastard Redgrave had a limit:
Being spammed with...Zippocat...a picture of a RL kitten, being burned to death by stupid teenagers using Zippo fuel...the fact someone took a real animal, poured gas on it, and burnt it for real.
Offended is an apt word for the feeling we reflexively experience when thinking about someone intentionally burning a kitten to death. It comes from the latin word offensa, meaning "a striking against, a hurt or displeasure." We experience pain and then mentally strike out to attack and shut out to defend. We clench our fists and close our hearts.
I realize that many people believe that offense is a justifiable response to the malicious actions of others. Although I often react that way, I aspire to meet all experiences with a peaceful mind and heart. I am inspired by people who have met hate with compassion.
The Dalai Lama recounted meeting Lopon-la, a Lhasa monk he knew before the Chinese occupation. Lopon-la had spent 18 years in a Chinese prison before he was released and came to India:
He told me the Chinese forced him to denounce his religion. They tortured him many times in prison. I asked him whether he was ever afraid. Lopon-la then told me: 'Yes, there was one thing I was afraid of. I was afraid I may lose compassion for the Chinese.'
Peace in the face of griefers and distant kitten burners seems a relatively achievable goal
November 8, 2010
Assuming we can retain a semblance of inner peace, there is still the challenge of deciding if and how we should respond externally to communication that strikes us as mean-spirited, abusive, contemptuous or otherwise tinged with ill intent. The first thing to consider is that we may be misreading the other person's intent or exaggerating the maliciousness of the message. That's a common problem in virtual communication. We often fill in the blanks of missing emotional meta-data such as body language, vocal tone, pacing, etc. with negative projections.
Even if we're accurately reading the negative tone, it's quite likely that the venom is less directed at us personally than at what we represent to the other party. Flame wars on social networks and blogs are mostly between people who have never met in real-time or have had a chance to develop relationships prior to the current conflict. We weave a few scattered impressions into the visceral sense that we know the other person. We don't.
Unfortunately, the process of projection is really hard to notice within ourselves. It's certainly hard for me. So over the last couple of years, my general philosophy has been to ignore flamish behavior on social networks. In blog comments, I try to respond with a mixture of reason and humor. In at least some cases, I've found it is possible to move from initial antagonism to constructive conversation. On the other side of the coin, I've blocked one person on Twitter when multiple attempts at constructive conversation failed. In any case, counting to ten is always a good idea!
(The comment thread from the initial article can be found here.)
Get with program, old-timer. You're like, "When I was a kid, fiction stayed within the printed page where it belonged and would not dream of stepping out into the real world." Excerpt from my reply to @prokofy in Fall From Grace post
This rant is directed at those of you who have criticized others for not expressing their "real self" in online identity. I'm going to prove that you're a self-righteous hypocrite in just a few easy steps. Unless you're too scared to take the test I propose. Ready?
Take a look in the mirror. I'm not being metaphoric. I mean get up from your chair, walk into the bathroom and look into the mirror. If you're wearing any makeup or hair products, wash them off. Go ahead. I'll wait for you.
Now dig your phone out of your pocket and take a head-shot photograph of yourself in the mirror. Ideally, you'll use a nice magnified makeup mirror that shows off your complexion in all of its glory. Got it? Great!
Next, take off all of your clothes except for your underwear and take a full body photo. No sucking in your gut! Don't fix your posture. Alright. You can go back to your computer.
Now upload the headshot you just took and replace all of the cool avatar images that currently represent you online such as your twitter avatar and facebook profile picture and replace it with the head shot you just captured. Next, replace any larger images that represent you with the full body shot. And if you have a blog, add it to your "about me section".
While we're at the "about me", we might as well make sure your real self is reflected. Take a few moments and replace whatever is there now with the plain truth. Something like:
"Middle aged, overweight under-achiever unable to form lasting intimate relationships. Enjoys self-medicating with alcohol and compensating for low self-esteem by attacking others on the internet."
All done? No? Why not? Haven't you expressed the opinion that it is unethical to misrepresent yourself virtually?
The truth is that everyone is selective about what they represent about themselves online. This extends from the images we use on profile pictures to the comments we make in social network streams and blogs. And the question of authentic representation is not just about what we share, but about what we withhold.
So unless you're ready to present a no-spin, unadorned, unretouched depiction of yourself including all of your dirty laundry, please stop whining about others and get your own fake-ass house in order.
After days of conversations around the Silent Majority posts, I've been struck by a visceral sense of longing for the deep joy I experienced in my first year of virtual life when I roamed Second Life in innocence, bliss and open-hearted benevolence. Although I didn't realize it at the time, the gift of Eden was only granted for as long as I refrained from sharing the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and remained within fully immersed impersonal pseudonymity.
During the first six months or so, my emerging consciousness was completely bounded by my character within the virtual world. When confronted with any information that was outside the boundary of my backstory, I responded as if I was just learning about it for the first time. This induced a powerful state of beginner's mind which facilitated a seemingly never ending stream of micro-realizations and a sense of perfection in thought and deed.
No matter how hard I was pressed, I not only refused to provide any personally identifying information, but steadfastly refused to even admit to a human behind the avatar. This allowed my interaction with others to be open-hearted and impersonal, from the perspective of a being who was free of all biological drives, psychological baggage and selfish interests.
My fall from grace finally came when a number of evolving friendships tempted my human creator to inject himself into the relationships, one small disclosure at a time. And like the mythic Eve, from the very first taste of the forbidden fruit, it was only a matter of time before my Adam and I were expelled from our idyllic home. For our union could not create a whole that was greater than the sum of our parts, but instead spawned a shadow that eclipsed and homogenized our individuated suns.
Of course, there were other factors that led to my current incarnation as an openly fictitious identity. And I don't know where I would be today if I had resisted my biological brother's intrusion into my world. Perhaps I would have been completely abandoned due to the unsustainability of living two full and fully firewalled lives simultaneously. And like they say, there's no going home.
I'll leave you with the original three comic panels that were created to share the story of my origin. Although I had planned to expand this into a larger narrative, they still stand alone:
