Virtual Dance on the Atomic Plain

A meditation on the connection between the virtual and the physical; the digital and the atomic.

A Musical Interlude

A song about living with impermanence.

Jessie James speaks out on my new novel

Twitter O'Clock: The Dark Video

I've been helping some of the teams at our company put together short videos for our semiannual all hands meeting. I decided to throw one in for my department and ended up taking a post from last February, editing into a prose poem, and shooting a ranting performance with a much darker edge.



(By the way, I'm still furiously working on the novel, rewriting a lot as I go. It's up to about 13,000 words so far. It's been a lot of fun so far, although still 90% or so to go. I'll post another excerpt soon.)

The Push and Pull of Mediums on Creative Expression

This is a video sketch of a dream sequence for Jess as she undergoes her superpower medical procedure. It was pretty easy to put together, given the way Plotagon allows you to quickly flip characters while keeping the same dialogue. It's not quite baked, but you get the idea. I hope to have time over the weekend to flesh it out.

Each medium and platform has its own push and pull moving users to actualize their ideas in certain ways. Even text, whose grammar and natural syntax put all but the most innovative (or illiterate) writers into a fairly narrow box of expressive form.

I guess this can be taken a step closer to home and view the human brain and senses as also shaping the way we express and receive creative works. For instance, there are limitations in our ability to perceive the visible and audio spectrums. And cultural metaphors and story forms are so ingrained into our psyches that we usually end up conforming to some preexisting template.

Some of my favorite artists and writers tend to repeat forms and themes over the course of multiple works. Part of this is because they simply enjoy a particular motif, but I believe that there are also subconscious factors at play ranging from psychological issues they're subconsciously attempting to work through, to limitations in vision or craft. And for successful creatives, there's also the fear of alienating their audience and losing the associated money and fame.

For those of us creating on an amateur level, there may be less skill in our craft, but certainly more freedom to experiment without repercussion. As always, I encourage those of you who don't typically create to pick some medium and dig in. If you stick with it, it's likely to unlock creative potential that was probably buried in grade school after someone's criticism of your finger paint work became the final straw that pushed you away from artistic expression.

The Age of the Amateur

When I take the time to think about it, I am awed by the way technology has empowered amateur creativity. Just a few of decades ago, the ability to craft a creative work and share it with a large number of people was limited to a handful of professionals and media companies. Today, anyone with a smart phone, tablet or computer can create anything from a short video on Snapchat to a full blown animated work with Plotagon, and share it instantly worldwide with a few taps or clicks.

Whether a work is viewed by a few dozen or a few million, the ease of creation and sharing has motivated millions of people to creative expression they wouldn't otherwise have realized. The widespread activity of continuous creative expression is in the process of producing a psychological and cultural shift of historic proportion, the impact of which will only reveal itself over decades. The ubiquitous use of smartphones and social sharing is subtly shifting humanity to what can fairly labeled as psychological cyborgs, because neurologically, the tools we commonly used are experienced as being part of our own bodies.

The continued evolution of creative mobile technologies will eventually result in a renaissance of imaginative expression that will expand from our personal lives and popular media to just about every segment of the business world. Like the strength and endurance we build working out is carried into our lives outside the gym, the exercise of our creativity in living rooms and coffee houses carries over into our working lives. On a personal level, the last five years of personal creative work has certainly revolutionized my own professional work.

That said, throw away all of my world-change speculation and the Age of the Amateur is still amazing. Beyond the shear joy of creativity, it gives the average Joe and Jane access to experiences that were once the sole domain of professional authors and artists. Although the quality of the works we create may pale in comparison, the psychological insight and growth we experience is equivalent.

I am continuously surprised and delighted by the doors new platforms open for creative expression. Beyond music, my tech-fueled creative life was born in 2008 with my introduction to both Second Life and the iPhone. Second Life allowed me to free my imagination from the constraints of the physical world and my wallet name identity. The iPhone freed me to create and share, with increasingly sophisticated tools, at any time and in any place.

This is still being realized through my latest amateur project, the Life With Jess video series. For instance, I didn't see this new huge plot twist coming. I woke up yesterday morning and there it was. Like it had been planned from the start. So Life With Jess Episode 17 turns out to be the concluding video in the first story arc and sets up a whole new life for my favorite little narcissist.

The Guru Jessie James: What I've learned from Life With Jess.

I'm finally beginning to figure out what Jessie James and the Life With Jess narrative has been trying to tell me. In short, it's a wake up call to the fact that my own happy sense of life is only made possible through ongoing inattention and apathy regarding the suffering of others. And that I have a foundational and pervasive sense of entitlement based on what is mostly just good fortune.

I'm not saying that I'm a bad person. In fact, I'm probably above average on a scale between ISIS beheaders and  the Dali Lama. But I can see the seeds of Jessie's character within my own consciousness. They do not come to fruition in the same overt intensity. But to her defense, Jess is a fictional character in an animated series, so there's no real harm done. 

In the fictional universe I've created so far, the consequences are never visualized. I don't show Lizzie huddled in the bathtub cutting herself with a razor blade in order to feel like she has some control in a life that is full of shame and coercion. Or the Dean standing on a chair with shaking knees, an electric wire tied to a ceiling fixture and wrapped around his neck, contemplating oblivion instead of facing his colleagues and wife when Jessie threatens to expose his affairs with students.

These dark undertones began to hit me as I was writing the script for the men responding to Lizzie's SeekingArrangements.com ad. Although they were still over the top caricatures, there was a more realistic resonance and ugliness that Jessie's cute lovability masked in previous episodes. So here's the uncut version, without the mitigation of Jessie's presence:

Writing the Micro-Sitcom

It's been interesting trying to sustain Life with Jess over the course of ten episodes. The simplicity of the Plotagon platform makes it easy to turn dialogue into animated scenes. But the limitations are challenging. Only two characters can appear at a time. There are very few animated actions available, and no ability to move the characters around a scene, other than jump-cutting to a small number of preset locations.

The main puzzle has been figuring out how to bring in plot points that can't be visualized. The solution so far has been exposition, which is not ideal, but has proven to be an opportunity to add humor, as Jess describes her plans and exploits while Samir plays the naive straight man.

Although there's been a number of running jokes, like "that bitch Lizzie," these two videos are my first attempt to sustain a major narrative through two episodes. Although some of the jokes depend upon having viewed prior episodes, they hopefully stand up okay on their own. These are edited versions of the raw video from Plotagon.

Art, Ego and Social Sharing

My name is Botgirl Questi and I'm a compulsive social sharer. (Hi, Botgirl!) Over the past six years I've posted 15,000 tweets, 2000 blog posts, 250 videos and 3000 images on Flickr. Not to mention Facebook, Plurk, Tumblr, etc. And do you know how much money I've made from all this effort? Zero. So why do I keep doing it?

It's complicated. Or if not complicated, at least complex: A twisted web of reasons tangled so tightly that it's hard to discern between art and ego, creativity and compulsion. In any case, I'm happier when I'm doing it than when I'm not. Happier creatively lubricated than blocked. So fuck it, right?

Here's my new favorite character musing over the topic.

Pseudonymous Interactions: One Twitter Conversation with Three Animations

I had a great conversation on Twitter yesterday with Strawberry Singh. I thought it would be fun to use Plotagon to animate it. Since neither Strawberry nor I have avatars on Plotagon, I decided to use the main protagonist in my Life with Jess series. After viewing it, I got the idea of using the same script with different characters to see how it would impact perception of the dialogue. Given the pseudonymity of virtual experience, what do you think after watching the depictions. Does the actual gender, age, nationality, etc. of the person you're chatting with make a difference to you?


One Twitter Conversation with Three Casts from Botgirl Questi on Vimeo.

Life with Jess 05 - Social Media Report

You can view the entire Life with Jess series here.

Life with Jess Trailer

The Life with Jess project has been taking on a life of it's own. Here's a trailer for what is so far a three episode micro-sitcom series.

Life with Jess: Social Media Safety

You can view the rest of the Life with Jess series on here.

Fatties Eating Fast Food

After playing around with the new version of Plotagon, one of the characters began speaking to me and I decided to make a few videos featuring her. Jess is a self-absorbed teenager who is whip-smart, but cluelessly amoral and narcissistic. This episode has her facing off with the principal about an offensive video she posted on YouTube.

Acceptable Friend Conduct

Loosely inspired by authentic juicy gossip I got straight from the lips of a second-hand witness. (Created with Plotagon on an iPad.)

High School Zen

Plotagon for the iPad came out today. The basic app is free, with downloadable content available for a dollar or two each. Here's my first video using the new mobile platform. All of the raw video came from the iPad app. I did a little editing and post production on a Mac before uploading to Vimeo. You can see the unedited version here.

Plotagon Characters Reflect on Their Upcoming Demise

I've had a lot of fun creating short videos on Plotagon over the past year. They've recently announced that they are replacing their current platform for another that will also run mobile devices. They are moving away from photorealism and moving to a more stylized cartoony look. They're also changing their speech synthesis vendor and will eventually allow you to record your own voice performances. This video imagines what their existing characters might think of the upcoming changes.

I Rift Therefore I Am

A brief discussion about the value of virtual reality. 

Video Edition of Message of the Virtual World Medium

Excerpts from my comments on The Past Present and Future of Virtual Worlds panel at this year's VWBPE. You can view the unedited two hour video here.

Good Riddance to 2013: A Retrospective

I hated 2013 and am happy to see it go. It was pretty much a year of sickness, death and loss for me and my family. Nevertheless, I did manage to stay marginally creative and will wind down the year with some of my favorite videos, images and articles. This one was actually posted on New Year's Eve, in the calm before the storm. The images are a mix of Second Life, doll photography and FrameForge.