Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0806291022001.14982@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: new bodies for old
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:22:21 -0400 (EDT)
new bodies for old http://www.alansondheim.org/ aabody series after advanced/character/ menu produced male and female characters accouterments and refused to return all hir objects Think of SL as an abstracted 4-dimensional space-time continuum: What are the built-in constraints? Fundamental forces like gravity have to be built-in; there's no _inherent_ reason for its existence. The ceiling instead - that which backgrounds the continuum - is corporate, and as such might as well be a corporate model for future-culture and cultural proc- esses in the 'real world.' The corporate model is fundamentally a tacit and leaky one. Tacit: because its operations are quickly treated as natural by body and mind (invisible prosthesis). And leaky: because it fills every space, construes every op- eration, colors and codes within and throughout the true world invisible. "Corporate" is not restricted to either a particular mode of capital or power, nor a particular mode of governance - but instead is a basic and backgrounding mode of quantification, related in Second Life and for that matter, the older MOOs and MUDs, by the assignment of hierarchies, parent- child processes, and identification numbers within the world, world-build- ing, and worlding "in general." Given this constraint, what are others, and how do they relate? At least for the moment, one logs in and out of SL; inactivity logs one out and for the most part, when one logs out, one's body disappears (unlike a MOO, for example, where a body might be found somnolent in a "body-bag"). In other words, one's activity is _framed_ by a process of intention and/or tend- ing-towards, a process which requires a particular action on the part of the participant - which in fact constructs the framing of the very concept of participation. One is constrained by the process of building, but this is also a matter of time, energy, money, and nuisance. A similar constraint exists for land-ownership - and within SL, ownership is both relative (in relation to the corporation and the continuous output of the corporation, in terms of finance, governance, capital, and power in general), and absolute: The land that is owned is purely and totally _intended_; it has no otherwise existence or mode of being, no wilderness. (One might designate or assign a region as wild, but this an intended act as well; it is neither obdurate or substance, "idiotic inert" no analog.) At least at the moment, one is constrained by three-dimensionality and its projection into the 2-space of the screen. Given that, objects may inter- sect and self-intersect and may or may not be "gravitationally" bound. One is constrained by modes of behavior, coded and uncoded; by bandwidth; by one's terminal (therefore one's economy and one's relationship to class and corporate in any world); by one's health in the physical world; by one's ability to script and code. Where is the internal (not to mention external) history, per participant and/or login, of Second Life and its denizens? Where are the rolls of land ownership and usage? The history of SL's code and coding? The detailing of its proprietary software? (The world itself is closed-source.) (For surely the world as a whole may be investigated, as a book of nature, a supine woman, an angry man, red in tooth and claw, as God's hand and God's shriveled hand, as systemic coordination and mathesis, as semiosis, as subject and object of dissection, of nothing whatsoever.) One's steam runs out ...