Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0807270005460.13799@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Dreams of Better Worlds Concrete
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:06:12 -0400 (EDT)
Dreams of Better Worlds Concrete | http://www.alansondheim.org/ bild jpgs | http://www.alansondheim.org/bild.mp4 | http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 | Images from intractive avatar game in The Accidental Artist exhibition, | SL; avatar movement deconstructs architecture, frees the space. No | score, no wins or losses; continuous play produces continuous | deconstruction. The video is in black and white; color from the site | refuses to compress properly. Think of it: Second Life (or similar virtual spaces) as a simulacrum of humanity's dream of flying, of malleable space and time; think of SL as a laboratory for the practical/theoretical phenomenology of space and time. What occurs in human flight, in the presence of strangers, in weight= lessness, in sudden weight, in anonymity, in exposure, in agoraphobia or clausterphobia? I work daily and nightly in the exhibition space, trying things out, not primarily for the aesthetics, but for the cog-sci, psycho- logical, psi-a comprehension that may or may not occur. Lacan or Minsky might not be at home in these spaces, but they exist on the periphery of theory. It's far too easy to dismiss virtual spaces in relation to what might be considered the other, in terms of community, politics, political economy, information economy, religion, etc. But first there is community in SL, ideological struggle, etc., although not played out against the scarcity of necessary resources; bandwidth and prim number are irrelevant compared to lack of food or sleep. On the other hand it's the very absence of noise that makes SL more like a savanna than an urban center, and a savanna that at times allows one to speak and perceive with a clarity bordering on the uncanny. While it may be slightly difficult learning to move smoothly through SL, it's no more difficult than learning a sport or board-game, and the results are equally enriching. I don't want to sound like an advertisement for SL or virtual worlds in general - but I do want to indicate their potential for psychological and phenomenological experimentation. What one sees can be seen from one's home; there's an established intimacy that the heavy cultural institut- ionalization of museums and galleries doesn't have. The economy is on a far smaller scale as well; over the years I've been on SL for example,, I've paid eight dollars and eighty cents in real money for uploads to the SL server - a small price, given the potential. Most of what I construct - animations, textures, sounds, texts, prims, are created with open source software outside SL. To fly, to make objects disappear and appear at will, to revolve or otherwise motivate them, to ignore or stress gravity, to move among the problematic of things, to move through them, to court invisibility, to view oneself from one's body or alterity, to speak or write (courting both phoneme and grapheme), to operate within or beneath erasure, to create or annihilate, send objects into or out of the world - to do any of these things, and more, in any combination - within the limits of the computer - limits which are perhaps far too often emphasized (instead of seeing potential and the potential for expansion) - this is what, for the moment while the net is up and running - this is what we can work with, in how- ever limited our physical off-world conditions might be - and this is the promise, holding for the slightest while - for the premise of communica- tion or its lack, analogic inert and digital coded and their intermingled limits. It continues to surprise me, how many complaints there are about these worlds, from lambda-moo and earlier, and how little joy is expressed over their current possibilities - what they can do _now._ Forget the holodeck; there are already (what would have passed for) miracles afoot. This isn't arguing against the need for deconstruction and critique of SL's and other virtual worlds' political economy - just that one can proceed in addition from the bottom up, seeing for example what happens when a prim is grounded or sent elsewhere, say, into another physics, with a shape-rider upon it, another shape-rider perhaps desperately controlling the action, such as it is. Then again, what constitutes a prim, a thing, a thing-in-itself, a proto- col, a code, an atom, a table of elements or fundamental particles, a resonance or plasma sending material worlds askew, exhausted, towards the defuge of potential (but never complete) annihilation? And what better way to think these things through, than to try them, on however distorted or miniscule a scale. -