Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0709252047360.3641@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: SL - theoretical approaches
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:47:56 -0400 (EDT)
SL - theoretical approaches Second Life behaviors come as animations which may eventually go down to the frame, but are packages in any case. There is a relation with older silent film and melodrama patterns - what have been dubbed histrionic gestures. A good text here is Bharata's Natyasastra, which discusses, among other things, rasa and pattern presentations. Patterns are used as generators of audience psychological response. The text not only considers patterns independently, but as group structures. Second Life bodies touch on the abject, but don't 'enter' within it; there are issues of purity and corruption. Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, Path to Purity, is extremely important in this regard, especially in relation to illusion and suffering. There are also kasinas which are may be related to landscape 'focal points' in SL. A second important text is the Hevajra- tantra with its multiple bodies; it might be worth looking at the works of Tsong Ka-Pa in this regard as well. (Again, Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Lingis, Mary Douglas, all come to mind.) In terms of ontology, Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, is critical, given its analysis of dependent (co)-origination ad emptiness. This correlates almost too neatly with the ontology and epistemology of protocols on one hand and the abject body on the other. Dependent (co)-origination can also be related to Indra's Net and the relation of the Net to the Internet as a collocation of nodes, at least on an epistemological level. One might ask what is the ontology of SL from _within_ protocols - and whether such a question makes any sense at all. To self-active an SL avatar - use the screen itself as vision, motion- detection across the image - feed this into AI neural networks - output back into SL through encoded behaviors. Note the ontological and epis- temological shifts involved: from digital readout through analog screen (2D) interpretation. Finally there are the old MOOs - MUDs-object-oriented, where MUDs stood for multi-user-dungeon (or some such - out of the old D&D gaming). MOOs are text-only virtual realities, somewhat similar to SL. One of the biggest differences: MOOs are open-source and can easily be set up on any linux/unix box. Now MOOs (like SL) have a system of unique identification tags for every object, player, etc., and this is hierarchical (much like unix itself, with the root / ). Explore the earliest numbers (which re- flect the sysadmins, wizards, MOO structure as a whole. Remap through dependent (co)-origination. (It should be noted that the Sharp Zaurus, which runs on embedded but easily terminal-accessible linux, has a file structure which 'resonates' with itself - one can literally go in circles through it. How can one think through these dependencies, proxies, etc.?) This might be a way of clarifying the philosophical issues - for example, one might think of both absolute and relative ontologies (much like URLs) - and then how the former maps onto the latter, or how all of this dis- appears. (Just as things disappear, mathematical objects appear to appear. So problems related to SL and avatars: the mapping of protocols, networks in relation to the visual; to mathesis and abstract ontologies; and to hardware implementations: static (ROM or storage where configuration is mapped thing that is read as virtual thing), and dynamic (where transmis- sion dynamics, ontologies, and economies are paramount).