Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0806271437470.12776@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Nikuko, others, performing
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:41:14 -0400 (EDT)
Nikuko, others, performing http://www.alansondheim.org/odyssey.mp4 High compression... this is from the workstation viewpoint... it's hard to see around the avatar which is enormous and glowing. Lucian Iwish came on later with a structure that enveloped the whole building... but with the show, the avatar I use is perhaps twenty-five feet high... Sandy's is both larger and smaller, variable, ghost-like... We had a few people the first night, a crowd the second (afternoon) who spoke mainly Italian. This sec= tion is from the first night. Live instruments included flute, chromatic harmonica, sampling keyboard. Sandy's texts flew amazingly, were from our theory writing on avatar and the like. My texts were paste-ins from the Jennifer, Nikuko, Doctor Leopold Konninger, Julu plays. Sound is from a number of simultaneous sources under the control of the viewer. You can talk or make live music in Second Life. Time of the recording was set to midnight. Second Life beyond the traditional physics (which can be countermanded to some extent by creating objects without physics) is incredibly malleable; a building roof can exist without support, marked- off territories may have no concrete barrier markers beyond the luminous floating signs; bodies can be modified at will; flying and teleportation are comment; one exists without breathing on land or sea; set carefully, one penetrates rocks; you might or might not see through your avatar's body; for that matter, objects may glow or be transparent; touch at a distance is possible and common; you may construct on land, in sea, within air; you normally disappear when your character logs out; environment and time may follow Second Life time or be set artificially; one might talk with one's voice, through internal instant messaging, or through chat; your avatar body may be distorted by others; everything depends on Linden corporation; Linden may well be able to hear any and all private conversa- tions; beyond Linden there's the horizon of bandwidth; particle emissions are quick and contain just about anything; buildings arise and fall in a twinkling of an eye... The time is midnight, the objects glow, intersect; I believe, without proof, that they are sliding in a fourth spatial dimen- sion through some flaw in the software; there are some bodies and some objects I may fly through; there are some I am held by; there are some who hold me; there are griefers and hackers; there are some who hold me... Who am I but avatar-Nikuko, Nikuko-avatar; she speaks through me; asserts her- self; possesses a literally uncanny insistence; turns towards withdrawn sexuality; is always waiting and awaiting, as I am always waiting and awaiting here. Flying through configurations, she settles on a certain appearance or style or look; I am back beyond the screen; she controls objects greater than any I have controlled; she is adroit. I am back beyond the screen; I'm blinded by the objects; for the most part I can't see ahead, only slight glimpses to the left and right, slight glimpses of the floorboards beneath her feet. There, beneath her feet, are the vector guides that somewhat make a mapping. I have three choices: stay within her body, breathe her breathless air, or fly her everywhere which gives me the slightest vision above the objects, or use mouselook, which allows me to see through Nikuko's eyes, gives me her sight, or scent, her touch, her perfume. But mouselook takes over the screen; the configuration menus and controls disappear; you're only there with her, in her, as she is in you; everyone else is present, easy to see and touch; you might run or swoop with delight; you might stay absolutely still; but your bound within her as your bound within Second Life as a Life, that is, as a being-in-the- world which gives you no escape, no meta-processes to fine-tune the process. You can't build that way; you are sunk in Nikuko's body, part of her avatar-flesh, sheave-flesh, sheave-mind, Linden-mind; your swallowing is her swallowing, your food her own. So in these performances, the more Nikuko gathers, the more I am flying blind, even building blind, speaking blind, dancing and yes choreographing blind, blind in this airless world with the trivial fact that it is I who see, dispersed-eye, not Nikuko who can only whisper through appearance, affect me through her slightest move- ment, walk and talk, sit and stand, nowhere at all. Yet there is something of a future here, not in Linden or the Corporation, neither in bandwidth nor in prim-counts, but in a peripheral and, again that uncanny insist- ence, that feeling that Nikuko is living, not as prosthetic or other device, not as prim, but perhaps as a not-so-prim woman or girl or neutral or male at the last or gender-ending moment of the real. For Nikuko has taken me, just like others have taken you into the unaccountable true world, with its lines of flight and inscriptions intensifications and dispersed gatherings of selves and bodies, the true world of scatterings, spews, emissions, radiations. And among all of this, Nikuko flies, swoops, cavorts, in nowhere, among an underground mathesis gone wild, presented for your pleasure or operating pleasure, for your frisson or sport- or spoor-world, for the spook or glow, fed by nothing, a picture for your pretty sight, a longing, for something, somewhere, languor ... ( stills still at http://www.alansondheim.org/ sldoc jpgs )